VEIN: High Scalability Routing Algorithm for Blockchain-based Payment Channel Networks

The payment channel networks (PCNs), as the main method of blockchain off-chain expansion, have received extensive attention in recent years. Using the PCNs, two unconnected parties in a transaction can forward payments through existing payment channels of other nodes, which dramatically reduces int...

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Bibliographic Details
Published in:IEEE ... International Conference on Trust, Security and Privacy in Computing and Communications (Online) pp. 43 - 50
Main Authors: Gong, Qianyun, Zhou, Chengjin, Qi, Le, Li, Jianbin, Zhang, Jianzhong, Xu, Jingdong
Format: Conference Proceeding
Language:English
Published: IEEE 01.10.2021
Subjects:
blockchain
Conferences
Ethereum
Heuristic algorithms
multi-path routing
payment channel network
Privacy
Prototypes
Routing
Scalability
Veins
ISSN:2324-9013
Online Access:Get full text
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Summary:The payment channel networks (PCNs), as the main method of blockchain off-chain expansion, have received extensive attention in recent years. Using the PCNs, two unconnected parties in a transaction can forward payments through existing payment channels of other nodes, which dramatically reduces interactions with the blockchain. But in large-scale dynamic PCNs, the routing mechanism is a challenge. Existing PCNs routing algorithms have some limitations. The landmark routing destroys the decentralization of blockchain. The static routing requires nodes having a global view and ultra-high computing power, which can not be applied to light nodes. We propose VEIN, a dynamic multi-path source routing algorithm, which is suitable for not only full nodes but also light nodes. We present an ingenious routing protocol, a modified max-flow algorithm to find edge-disjoint paths, and a path selection algorithm to deal with the NP-hard multi-path selection problem. Extensive experiments show that VEIN increases the transaction success ratio by 34% with the state-of-art algorithm, and realizes multiple orders of magnitude reduction in storage. In addition, we implement a prototype of VEIN on the Ethereum testnet to verify its feasibility.
ISSN:2324-9013
DOI:10.1109/TrustCom53373.2021.00024