A Rate-Distortion Approach to Anonymous Networking

The problem of hiding data routes in a wireless network from eavesdroppers is considered. Using Shannon’s equivocation as a measure of anonymity of routes, scheduling and relaying protocols are designed to guarantee anonymity. A duality of this problem to information-theoretic rate-distortion is used to maximize network throughput for any specified level of anonymity. The achievability of this throughput, however, requires each node to have knowledge of all routes in a network session. When each node only has access to local information about routes, a decentralized strategy is proposed, and the achievable throughput is characterized using a constrained distortion-rate optimization.

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