Real-Time Recursive Routing in Payment Channel Network: A Bidding-based Design

Payment Channel Network (PCN) is proposed as a promising layer-two solution to tackle the scalability problem of current blockchain systems, which allows the two transacting parties to perform off-chain transactions through their established payment channel. For the transacting parties who are not directly connected, PCN allows them to route the transaction through some intermediate nodes with sufficient balance. Designing an efficient routing protocol is one of the most important and challenging problems in improving the performance of PCN. To tackle this challenge, we propose Real-Time Recursive Routing (RTRR), an efficient routing algorithm that can achieve a short routing time with strong privacy protection and high flexibility in the dynamic scenario. In addition, we investigate the bidding process in RTRR and derive the equilibrium strategy, which implies that the proposed protocol prefers to route the transaction through the nodes with a higher success rate, contributing to a better performance. Both the theoretical analyses and the empirical experiment results demonstrate the high efficiency of RTRR.