A Traffic Splitting Algorithm for Load Balancing in Tor

As the most popular anonymous communication system, Tor provides anonymous protection for users by sending their messages through a series of relays. Due to the use of the bandwidth-weighted path selection algorithm, many more users choose routers with high bandwidth as relays. This will cause the utilization of high bandwidth routers to be much higher than that of low bandwidth routers, which will bring congestion risk. The Quality of Service (QoS) is difficult to guarantee for users who need delay-sensitive services such as web browsing and instant messaging. To reduce the average load of routers and improve the network throughput, we propose a circuit construction method with multiple parallel middle relays and conduct a dynamic load allocation method. The experiment demonstrates that our proposed method can provide better load balancing. Compared with other multipath anonymous communication networks, our proposed method can provide better anonymity.

Automated summary

As the most popular anonymous communication system, Tor provides anonymous protection for users by sending their messages through a series of relays. However, the use of bandwidth-weighted path selection algorithm results in higher congestion risk for routers with high bandwidth. To address this issue, we propose a circuit construction method with multiple parallel middle relays and a dynamic load allocation method.