Relay bandwidth needed to pay back Hidden Service usage

grarpamp grarpamp at gmail.com
Sun Jan 10 06:00:57 UTC 2010


Say a hidden service makes available a 100,000 byte file. Now
another user downloads that file. There was obviously some 'cost'
in bytes to the six hop relay system for doing that.

Say the user who downloaded that file feels obligated to repay his
usage back to the system by running his own non-exit relay. How
many bytes should he offer back to the network?

It may be more proper to think of it as bandwith. Server serves a
stream 24x7x365 at 100,000bps. User consumes it 24x7x365. How much
inbound and outbound pipe should user provision to replace his usage?


When compared to the internet, the network is a closed system with
finite resources, so the cost is certainly not equal to his usage
[ie: 1x]. His usage causes a depression of overall available resources
during the transfer.

I thought it might simply be 6x his usage due to 6 hops. But maybe
it involves adding 6 increasing fractions? And what about the middle
relays that both receive and send the supply stream?

Tor overhead and packet retransmissions can be ignored. Tor's
configuration limits and the availablity of any given pipe size can
also be ignored as this is only an excercise.

The return tcp ack stream would not be negligible but could be left
out by reference... only if it was simply additive on top of the
supply stream using the same calculations.
***********************************************************************
To unsubscribe, send an e-mail to majordomo at torproject.org with
unsubscribe or-talk    in the body. http://archives.seul.org/or/talk/



More information about the tor-talk mailing list