Improving Success Rate of Transactions in Crypto currency Payment Channel Networks

Abstract

In the recent times, the interest in Blockchainbased crypto currencies has increased rapidly. But the slow time of confirmation of transaction and the high charges per transaction prove to be a problem in the adoption of this technology for micro-payments. To solve this scalability problem, the idea of establishing payment channel networks where nodes establish payment channels between each other to perform offchain transactions. However, this method results in a certain one-way capacity for both nodes for making transactions which means that if a node exceeds its capacity, the channel becomes useless in that direction and hence the payment fails which creates an imbalance in the network. In this paper we aim to increase the rate of success of payments by using the fact that each node is connected to multiple points in a network which can act as gateways and we can use any of these gateways to complete a transaction. By using the inbound and outbound payment traffic ratio, we also define a method for the selection of a particular gateway to carry out the transaction. We use split payment capability with this method to increase the rate of success furthermore, especially for larger transactions.