Assessing Routing Algorithms for Payment Channel Networks

Abstract

Payment Channel Networks (PCNs) are a promising approach to overcome scalability issues of blockchains. To achieve efficient payments in PCNs, it is necessary to route transactions between a payer and a payee. Especially in large-scale PCNs, multi-hop routing becomes necessary, since transactions need to be relayed by nodes. For this, a scalable routing algorithm is needed, which fits the individual objectives of PCN users. In this article, we study whether routing protocols from the field of Wireless Sensor Networks can be applied in PCNs. To this end, we first derive requirements for routing in PCNs, select suitable approaches, and analyze to which degrees they perform well and meet the requirements. We adapt selected protocols and evaluate them with regard to the lengths of payment paths, fees, and success ratio.