Watchtower Selection in Off-Blockchain PCN Using Peterson Leader-Election Algorithm

Abstract

Despite the incredible adoption of cryptocurrencies, blockchain-based cryptocurrencies have likewise raised some concerns. The scalability problem is the major one among them. An off-blockchain payment channel network (PCN) has been introduced to solve this issue. PCN can fundamentally reduce blockchain scalability by constructing a number of payment channels between the nodes and without committing every single transaction to the blockchain. But as a matter of fact, there has an unwanted assumption in PCN that channel participants must remain online and follow blockchain updates, for the synchronization with blockchain to protect the channel against deception. To mitigate this issue “Watchtower” concept has been proposed. Watchtower is a watching service and always stays online that a channel participant can hire it by offering incentives for monitoring the channel and checking blockchain updates consistently to prevent fraud on behalf of the hiring party. However, watchtower may be more beneficial by cooperating with the cheating counterparty and neglecting to perform the watching service properly. The efficiency drawback can occur for that. In this work, we have been motivated by this issue and tried to find out an effective and reliable watchtower for the channel watching service from multiple watchtower nodes or candidates in the PCN. In particular, we have been approached by using the distributed Peterson Leader-Election Algorithm to find the best watchtower among multiple of them where the more successfully performed work node or candidate will be selected for the channel monitoring job. We also have provided a detailed step-by-step process of the algorithm including experiments and illustrations for employing watchtower among multiple of them.