Performance Comparison between IP Routing and Onion Routing

Abstract

The world is suffering from many political sanctions imposed by governments on their other counterparts to include the general public without exception. Among these sanctions is the practice of some countries to block publicly available websites from the peoples of other countries This research dealt with the practical implementation of a prototype model of internet access unblocking system based on the onion routing (TOR) network infrastructure, as a solution for the nationwide internet blocked access problem. The system performance is evaluated in comparison with the direct access case of IP routing. The average response time for downloading web pages with different sizes in (KB) is used as a comparison metric. From the measured results it is concluded that, the difference of average response time in seconds between the case of direct access and the case of access through the unblocking system has closed values for different downloaded file sizes, with average equal to 0.72 sec, which represents the average latency that produced by the relays of TOR network. The difference of average response time in percent is decreasing with the file size exponentially, to be less than 7.6% when the file size is greater than 124kB, because the delay for routing traffic through the relays of TOR network has more effect on the first data packet of the same connection, while the rest of the packets come in succession with negligible effect on throughput reduction.