Buses for Anonymous Message Delivery

Abstract. This work develops a novel approach to hide the senders and the receivers of messages. The intuition is taken from an everyday activity that hides the ``communication pattern''—the public transportation system. To describe our protocols, buses are used as a metaphor: Buses, i.e., messages, are traveling on the network, each piece of information is allocated a seat within the bus. Routes are chosen and buses are scheduled to traverse these routes. Deterministic and randomized protocols are presented, the protocols differ in the number of buses in the system, the worst case traveling time, and the required buffer size in a ``station.'' In particular, a protocol that is based on cluster partition of the network is presented; in this protocol there is one bus traversing each cluster. The clusters' size in the partition gives time and communication tradeoffs. One advantage of our protocols over previous works is that they are not based on statistical properties for the communication pattern. Another advantage is that they only require the processors in the communication network to be busy periodically.