"A Rate-Distortion Approach to Anonymous Networking" P. Venkitasubramaniam and L. Tong Forty Fifth Annual Allerton Conference on Communication, Computing and Control, Monticello, IL, Sep. 2007.
The problem of hiding data routes in a wireless network from eavesdroppers is considered. Using Shannon's equivocation as a measure of anonymity of routes, scheduling and relaying protocols are designed to guarantee anonymity. A duality of this problem to information-theoretic rate-distortion is used to maximize network throughput for any specified level of anonymity. The achievability of this throughput, however, requires each node to have knowledge of all routes in a network session. When each node only has access to local information about routes, a decentralized strategy is proposed, and the achievable throughput is characterized using a constrained distortion-rate optimization.