A Novel Anonymous Communication Strategy with Respect to Payment Mechanism

Anonymous communication systems are vulnerable to free-riders who use the systems while provide little or no service to other users in the systems. An anonymous communication strategy is proposed to promote and encourage participants to provide service to the systems. We analyze the number of coins that a sender uses to pay for the peers on its anonymous route, and propose a new measure in the payment mechanism that is suitable to a next-hop anonymous system. Theoretical analysis shows that the system with the new payment mechanism promotes anonymous communication effectively while it keeps the system performance comparable to the existing anonymous systems such as Crowds. Moreover, the new system avoids the drawback of existing anonymous systems that enforces no upper bound on the length of anonymous routes.