Utility-aware Payment Channel Network Rebalance

Wangze Ni, Pengze Chen, Lei Chen, Peng Cheng, Chen Jason Zhang, Xuemin Lin

Research output: Chapter in book / Conference proceedingConference article published in proceeding or bookAcademic researchpeer-review

Abstract

The payment channel network (PCN) is a promising solution to increase the throughput of blockchains. However, unidirectional transactions can deplete a user’s deposits in a payment channel (PC), reducing the success ratio of transactions (SRoT). To address this depletion issue, rebalance protocols are used to shift tokens from well-deposited PCs to under-deposited PCs. To improve SRoT, it is beneficial to increase the balance of a PC with a lower balance and a higher weight (i.e., more transaction executions rely on the PC). In this paper, we define the utility of a transaction and the utility-aware rebalance (UAR) problem. The utility of a transaction is proportional to the weight of the PC and the amount of the transaction, and inversely proportional to the balance of the receiver. To maximize the effect of improving SRoT, UAR aims to find a set of transactions with maximized utilities, satisfying the budget and conservation constraints. The budget constraint limits the number of tokens shifted in a PC. The conservation constraint requires that the number of tokens each user sends equals the number of tokens received. We prove that UAR is NP-hard and cannot be approximately solved with a constant ratio. Thus, we propose two heuristic algorithms, namely Circuit Greedy and UAR_DC. Extensive experiments show that our approaches outperform the existing approach by at least 3.16 times in terms of utilities.

Original languageEnglish
Title of host publicationProceedings of the VLDB Endowment
Pages184-196
Number of pages13
Volume17
Edition2
DOIs
Publication statusPublished - Oct 2023
Event50th International Conference on Very Large Data Bases, VLDB 2024 - Guangzhou, China
Duration: 25 Aug 202429 Aug 2024

Publication series

NameProceedings of the VLDB Endowment
PublisherVery Large Data Base Endowment Inc.
ISSN (Print)2150-8097

Conference

Conference50th International Conference on Very Large Data Bases, VLDB 2024
Country/TerritoryChina
CityGuangzhou
Period25/08/2429/08/24

ASJC Scopus subject areas

  • Computer Science (miscellaneous)
  • General Computer Science

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