A Multipath Routing for Payment Channel Networks for Internet of Things Microtransactions

Abstract

The blockchain with a distributed network structure can provide a reliable and secure environment for Internet of Things (IoT) transactions, which also suffers from low throughput, high computation overhead, and large transaction fee. Payment channel networks (PCNs) are developed to address the scalability issue of blockchain. A key enabler of PCNs is the path-finding services. Most of existing routing algorithms target at finding a single feasible path, which may lead to failure of large payments. Moreover, previous solutions did not consider the transaction fee of the chosen path, which is extremely important to cost-sensitive users. In this work, we design a new multipath routing algorithm for PCNs that aims at minimizing transaction fees. Together considering the determination of the optimal number of paths, the optimal path routes and the optimal allocation leads to difficulty of the problem. In addition, the transaction fees along the path are closely related to the amount of payment, and the capacity of a payment channel limits the payment that can be carried. To address these challenges, we propose MILPA-PCN, a cost-effective multipath routing framework for PCNs. We develop a genetic algorithm-based routing determination algorithm with carefully designed genetic operations. We evaluate MILPA-PCN based on the real trace of the lightning network, and verify that MILPA-PCN can reduce the transaction fee by 33.56% and improve the payment success rate by 14.45%.