How Can Randomized Routing Protocols Hide Flow Information in Wireless Networks?

Preventing the source-destination network flow information from being disclosed is pivotal for anonymous wireless network applications. However, the advance of network inference, which is able to obtain the flow information without directly measuring it, poses severe challenges towards this goal. Randomized routing is capable of hiding the flow information by injecting substantial errors to the network inference process. In this paper, we systematically study the behavior of randomized routing protocols, and categorize them into three templates, k-random-relay, k-random-neighbor and k-random-path based on their routing behaviors. We propose technical models to characterize these templates in terms of their induced inference errors and their delay costs. We also use simulations to validate the theoretical results. Our work provides the first systematic study on understanding both the benefit and the cost of using randomized routing to hide the flow information in wireless networks.