Demand-aware Channel Topologies for Off-chain Blockchain Payments

Julia Khamis; Ori Rottenstreich

eprint.iacr.org will be offline for approximately an hour for routine maintenance at 11pm UTC on Tuesday, April 16. We lost some data between April 12 and April 14, and some authors have been notified that they need to resubmit their papers.

Paper 2021/009

Demand-aware Channel Topologies for Off-chain Blockchain Payments

Julia Khamis and Ori Rottenstreich

Abstract

Abstract: Off-chain is a common approach to deal with the scalability problem of blockchain networks. It enables users toexecute multiple payments without committing each of them to the blockchain by relying on predefined payment channels. Apair of users can employ a payment even without a direct channel between them, via routing the payment through off-chainchannels involving other intermediate users. Users together with the off-chain channels form a graph, known as the off-chainnetwork topology. The off-chain topology and the payment characteristics affect network performance such as the averagenumber of intermediate users a payment is routed through, the amount of fees, or channel capacities needed to successfullyroute payments. In this paper, we study two basic problems in off-chain network design. First, efficiently mapping users toan off-chain topology with a known structure. Second, constructing a topology of a bounded number of channels that canserve well users with associated payments. We design algorithms for both problems and evaluate them based on real datafrom Raiden, the off-chain extension for Ethereum. Keywors:

Metadata

Available format(s): PDF
Category: Cryptographic protocols
Publication info: Preprint. MINOR revision.
Keywords: Blockchain·Off-chain·Topologies
Contact author(s): juliakhamis3 @ gmail com
History: 2021-01-06: received
Short URL: https://ia.cr/2021/009
License: CC BY

BibTeX

@misc{cryptoeprint:2021/009,
      author = {Julia Khamis and Ori Rottenstreich},
      title = {Demand-aware Channel Topologies for Off-chain Blockchain Payments},
      howpublished = {Cryptology ePrint Archive, Paper 2021/009},
      year = {2021},
      note = {\url{https://eprint.iacr.org/2021/009}},
      url = {https://eprint.iacr.org/2021/009}
}