AERO: An adaptive and efficient routing for off-chain payment channel networks

Abstract

Blockchain technology faces significant scalability challenges, characterized by low throughput and high transaction fees. Off-chain payment channel networks offer a promising solution by enabling faster transaction processing by offloading transactions away from the main blockchain. While existing research has primarily focused on enhancing instantaneous throughput, it often overlooks the critical issue of fund distribution imbalance at either end of the channel following transactions. This imbalance can negatively impact subsequent transactions, leading to reduced long-term throughput. Furthermore, temporary insufficiencies in channel balances may cause transaction requests to fail, further hindering overall payment channel network (PCN) performance. To address these limitations, this paper introduces an adaptive and efficient routing scheme AERO that leverages a balance coefficient to assess fund availability within channels. AERO facilitates optimal transaction path selection while incorporating probabilistic measures to evaluate channel transaction capacity, ensuring adaptive routing with minimal transaction losses and enhancements. Additionally, the proposed transaction scheduling algorithm in AERO incorporates a waiting queue at the transaction node, executing transactions only when the channel’s capacity meets predefined requirements. Simulation results show that under the same network environment, AERO effectively maintains a throughput of approximately 70 even as transaction volumes rapidly increase. Moreover, AERO demonstrates notable cost efficiency, with transaction fees exceeding those of competing schemes by at least 5% in the Lightning topology and 25% in the Ripple topology.