Paper Info
Title
Routing Payments on the Lightning Network
Abstract
Bitcoin is a new digital currency created with the aim of being decentralized, peer-to-peer, censorship-resistant, borderless, scarce, fast and cheap to use. Since Bitcoin main way of operating is based on broadcast communications, e.g. all transactions of the currency reach all network peers, how to achieve scalability is one of the most important concerns for it to achieve wide usage. One of the proposals to improve its scalability takes the form of the Lightning Network (LN) which consists of an overlay network on top of the base Bitcoin layer. Such an overlay allows to perform a new kind of off-blockchain transactions, i.e. transactions not broadcast to the entire network, that, differently from previous off-blockchain solutions, do not require to put trust in any third entity. Important open problems of the LN are i) defining how payments should be routed and ii) establishing which fee policies intermediate nodes should apply for forwarding payments. The contributions of this work are twofold: we first propose a new, more general, way for nodes to apply fees for forwarding payments which allows to keep the network balanced and improve its performance in the long term. Secondly, we propose a new multipath routing payment scheme, based on the atomic multipath payment method, which is able to significantly reduce the fees paid by users, while being fast and also able to keep the network balanced.
Year
DOI
Venue
2018
10.1109/Cybermatics_2018.2018.00209
2018 IEEE International Conference on Internet of Things (iThings) and IEEE Green Computing and Communications (GreenCom) and IEEE Cyber, Physical and Social Computing (CPSCom) and IEEE Smart Data (SmartData)
Keywords
Field
DocType
Bitcoin,Blockchain,Peer-to-peer computing,Routing,Scalability,Protocols
Digital currency,Multipath propagation,Broadcasting,Multipath routing,Computer science,Computer network,Payment,Overlay network,Currency,Scalability
Conference
ISBN
Citations 
PageRank 
978-1-5386-7975-3
2
0.42
References 
Authors
0
4
Name
Order
Citations
PageRank
Giovanni Di Stasi1616.52
Stefano Avallone221321.34
Roberto Canonico316320.09
Giorgio Ventre452561.20