TY - GEN
T1 - Utility-aware Payment Channel Network Rebalance
AU - Ni, Wangze
AU - Chen, Pengze
AU - Chen, Lei
AU - Cheng, Peng
AU - Zhang, Chen Jason
AU - Lin, Xuemin
N1 - Publisher Copyright:
© 2023, VLDB Endowment. All rights reserved.
PY - 2023/10
Y1 - 2023/10
N2 - 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.
AB - 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.
UR - http://www.scopus.com/inward/record.url?scp=85182608515&partnerID=8YFLogxK
U2 - 10.14778/3626292.3626301
DO - 10.14778/3626292.3626301
M3 - Conference article published in proceeding or book
AN - SCOPUS:85182608515
VL - 17
T3 - Proceedings of the VLDB Endowment
SP - 184
EP - 196
BT - Proceedings of the VLDB Endowment
T2 - 50th International Conference on Very Large Data Bases, VLDB 2024
Y2 - 25 August 2024 through 29 August 2024
ER -