Flash: Efficient dynamic routing for offchain networks

Abstract

Offchain networks emerge as a promising solution to address the scalability challenge of blockchain. Participants make payments through offchain networks instead of committing transactions on-chain. Routing is critical to the performance of offchain networks. Existing solutions use either static routing with poor performance or dynamic routing with high overhead to obtain the dynamic channel balance information. In this paper, we propose Flash, a new dynamic routing solution that leverages the unique transactions characteristics in offchain networks to strike a better tradeoff between path optimality and probing overhead. By studying the traces of real offchain networks, we find that the payment sizes are heavy-tailed, and most payments are highly recurrent. Flash thus differentiates the treatment of elephant payments from that of mice payments. It uses a modified max-flow algorithm for elephant payments to find paths with sufficient capacity, and strategically routes the payment across paths to minimize the transaction fees. Mice payments are sent directly by looking up a routing table with a few precomputed paths to reduce probing overhead. Testbed experiments and trace-driven simulations show that Flash improves the success volume of payments by up to 2.3x compared to the state-of-the-art routing algorithm.