LEAF: Let's Efficiently Make Adaptive Forwarding in Payment Channel Networks

Abstract

Blockchain technology is widely applicable to modern payment systems but has inherent throughput limitations. Off-chain networks are proposed to solve scalability issues, which allows parties to efficiently perform micropayments without committing all of the payments to the blockchain. Off-chain payments with security and privacy protection requirements use the smart contract to ensure security and reduce the risk of sensitive information leakage. Although off-chain payments avoid expensive on-chain operations, it raises many concerns, such as the capacity limitation of payment channels and highly dynamic channel status, lowering the throughput of payment channel networks (PCNs). In our work, we explore the path overlap issues in PCNs and propose a decentralized payment routing scheme to improve the network throughput and reduce the redundant traffic overhead of PCNs, thereby guaranteeing efficient payments. The simulation results indicate that the proposed routing algorithm can achieve higher throughput than other routing schemes while guaranteeing short payment times.