The Tor Project has released details about a new system called Congestion Control and which promises to eliminate speed caps on its network.
The new system Congestion Control (Congestion control) is located at version of the Tor protocol 0.4.7.7, the latest fixed version available from last week. It is expected to lead to significant improvements in its performance, as well as to increased utilization of network capacity, according to Tor.
Tor (The Onion Router) is a volunteer-run network consisting of thousands of computers that serve as points access to encrypt the traffic of network users as well as exit nodes, which are essentially the gateways to the public internet (www).
The Tor Project's mission is to hide real location and interests tourof users, with the aim of absolute privacy and anonymity on the Internet.
One of the disadvantages of such a system is slow browsing speeds, which are crippled by traffic jams at Tor network nodes and queues.
Setting up traffic congestion on the Tor network is a challenge if one tries to improve them without compromising on privacy mechanisms. However, after nearly two decades of searching for solutions, the Tor Project finally introduced Congestion Control.
The new system implements three algorithms, Tor-Westwood, Tor-Vegas and Tor-NOLA, which collectively help reduce memory consumption and stabilize and minimize queue latency:
- Tor Westwood - minimizes packet loss in large tubes
- Tor-Vegas - calculates tail length and enters balancing elements
- Tor-NOLA - acts as a bandwidth delay estimator.
The Tor Project has done simulations to compare versions 0.4.6 and 0.4.7 and the results are impressive in all areas. They show a smoother and improved navigation without speed restrictions and bottlenecks, and without burdening the latency from end to end.
The more client PCs upgrade to version 0.4.7 (or later), the more obvious the increase in network performance will be for everyone, but the first results are already remarkable.
For the next major fixed release, version 0.4.8, Tor Project plans to implement a traffic segregation mechanism that will further improve its network speeds.
