The Effect of Nodes With Asymmetric Bandwidth on Network Performance in Tor

We present a series of experiments designed to test the effect of low bandwidth and asymmetrical bandwidth nodes on the performance of the Tor routing network. A simulation is designed to perform the tests, with a number of features that will make it useful for any further research into the performance of the Tor network. The experiments show that lower bandwidth does affect performance, and that there is a huge performance gap between having mostly and all slow nodes. We also find that asymmetrical connections perform no worse than symmetrical connections of equivalent upstream bandwidth.