GAA GPA GT-1 - ??
Global Tier-1 Internet and Telecom Backbones aka: rats, fiber splitting log and data giving, government cocksucking yes men and apologists Except maybe Joseph Nacchio of Qwest, so they jailed him too.
"between two edge hosts (aka src and dst)" is the point why more than say 3 to 9 hops adds little to nought - and if you're onion routing, not only reducing bw by [header_size] per layer, but consuming overall network bandwidth according to hop count
Which is why onioncat bittorrent users had howto on setting BT usage rate limits 1/7 under Tor limits to provide that bandwidth back. And partly why people should be able to understand that if they dedicate 1/Nth of their ISP pipe to a fulltime chaff padding fill network they can still get that entire rate as wheat on demand whenever needed, same as setting any overlay network today to 1/Nth. And see that a ping through an empty network still has roughly same usable latency as a ping though a network just at saturation, or at any other node-to-node fixed transport contract so long as CPU is available to perform the regulation.
(even delivery of storage or msgs is in a way a stream)
Even fixed envelope size messaging mixnets can end up pathing your message through a bunch of idle nodes to your recipient... no amount of store and forward random delay mixing is going to save you from end to end traffic analysis there. And people are talking about trying to use actual applications... mail, IRC, voice, video, file transfer, web services, shells, etc... over TCP / UDP etc... over overlays... all ultimately, end to end, input to output, streams of Bytes^N and pulsations and waves that stick out like canaries... over todays overlay networks, whether mix or circuit, that have degenerate paths, no traffic fill etc... Todays darknet overlays (ie: Tor onionspace, Pond, etc) survive pehaps not because they're particularly strong, but because their weakness is currently an open TOP SECRET, remanding all finds out to parallel construction. The encryption is probably pretty good. The who is talking to who is quite likely not the best regarding G*. People think it's hard to sift distill analyze and line up the waveforms coming off 2^32 IP addresses... it's not. This is not the old game of manually picking up the phone calling ISPs and tracing back 1990s crackers anymore. It's f(n) 24x365 lights out in Bluffdale and elsewhere... point, click, you're done. Next generation overlay networks must not fail to put serious effort into characterizing and mitigating the various G* traffic analysis, and Sybil, risks. Many of todays nets write those off, and or irresponsibly hush those topics under the rug (no doubt to appear better than they are). That's sad, and shameful.
Jurisdictional hops - e.g. through Russia if you're avoiding USGov etc - sound conceptually useful.
Intentional routing lets you select and diversify across different sets of fiber taps and Sybil deployment efforts, serves as fun random takedown splash page badge generator, increases spook workunits and their private backhaul lambdas required, etc...
Link(s) to Phantom please?
https://code.google.com/archive/p/phantom/ Other repos are not merged in.