Hello I am interested in profiling the UDP transport protocols, I think using a different underlying protocol could significantly improve Tor's performance and I would like to be part of that. At first, I thought that the project consisted of profiling existing udp transport code. However, I could not find existing implementation of the protocols described in the pdf[1] or the bug tracker[2]. The newest reference to the project was Murdoch's blog post, but even that's 3 year dated, and I couldn't find any followup. So, is changing Tor to udp still a thing? I see that the ecosystem now is far more complex than it was 3 years ago, and a change of the underlying protocol would be much cumbersome to implement across all the applications that currently interact with the Tor network. Another issue, is this project suitable for a GSoC project? I believe that only implementation and testing of the designs proposed in the pdf[1] would take longer than a summer. To finish it up, if this project is still kicking, could some pointers to it be given to me? I'd like to start working on my GSoC proposal asap. Cheers, Danilo (knorr) [1] https://research.torproject.org/techreports/datagram-comparison-2011-11-07.p... [2]https://trac.torproject.org/projects/tor/ticket/1855 [3]https://blog.torproject.org/blog/moving-tor-datagram-transport
On Thu, 6 Mar 2014 09:55:42 -0300 Danilo Carvalho vandor.danilo@gmail.com wrote:
I am interested in profiling the UDP transport protocols, I think using a different underlying protocol could significantly improve Tor's performance and I would like to be part of that.
https://research.torproject.org/techreports/libutp-2013-10-30.pdf
It's sort of been done. The project ended before they could get meaningful performance numbers, but an educated guess on my part says that they wouldn't have been that great in the presence of competing traffic, but I have not busted out ns-3 or anything so I could very well be wrong here.
I also don't really see how merely switching to UDP would be a net gain performance wise, since currently any suitable UDP based transport needs to implement a lot of TCP like features (reliable + in-order delivery, and congestion control).
Don't let my skepticism dissuade you if you're determined to do something like this, because there is potential for a lot of interesting research, but the scope of the project may be bigger than a summer one (Although reviving the libutp code and actually getting performance numbers may be something that is doable).
Regards,
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Danilo Carvalho -
Yawning Angel