Balanced Off-Chain Payment Channel Network Routing Strategy Based On Weight Calculation

Abstract

AbstractOff-chain payment channel network is an effective solution to deal with low throughput and high load on the blockchain. However, the quality of the routing scheme will directly affect the performance of the off-chain network system. Existing routing schemes cannot select an appropriate transaction path according to the actual needs of user nodes. And they may also lead to network congestion, channel imbalance and node centralization. This paper proposes a new balanced routing selection scheme based on weight calculation called BRBW, which builds a weight model by Analytic Hierarchy Process. BRBW comprehensively considers the channel capacity, handling fee and path length to improve transaction success rate, reduce channel congestion and maintain the long-term sustainability of the payment channel. It uses a modified maximum flow algorithm to find paths with sufficient capacity and selects the transaction path for a large payment through linear programming. Finally, we do some experiments and compare with state-of-the-art approaches in the test environment. Simulation results show that under the same network environment, the payment success rate of the BRBW is above 75%, and the channel utilization rate is about 10% higher than other schemes.