Evaluation of the Impact of Multipath Data Dispersion for Anonymous TCP Connections

Abstract

Despite recent research efforts, wireless ad hoc networking technology remains especially prone to security attacks. In this work our contribution focuses on determining the optimal trade-off between traffic dispersion and TCP performance to reduce the chances of successful eavesdropping, while maintaining acceptable levels of throughput. For our experiments we propose a multipath-enhanced version of DSR, and we compare Tahoe, Reno and Sack TCP variants. Results show that multipath traffic dispersion impact on TCP throughput is bounded to a maximum of 25-35%, and that there is only a minimal dependence on the number of routes used, the number of consecutive packets sent on each route, the route selection algorithm or the TCP variant used.