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Towards high-throughput cryptocurrency transactions in payment channel networks

Zhang, Yuhui
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Yang, Dejun
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2021
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2021 - Mines Theses & Dissertations
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Zhang_mines_0052E_12265.pdf
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https://hdl.handle.net/11124/14242
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2023-04-14
Abstract
The past decade has witnessed an explosive growth in blockchain, but the blockchain-based technologies have also raised many concerns, among which a crucial one is the scalability issue. Suffering from the large overhead of global consensus and security assurance, even the leading blockchain-based cryptocurrencies can only handle up to tens of transactions per second, which largely limits their applications in real-world scenarios. Payment channel networks (PCNs) have been proposed to improve the blockchain scalability on the application layer, which offers the off-chain settlement of transactions with minimal involvement of expensive blockchain operations. Unfortunately, as reported in the literature, there are still many challenges that need to be overcome towards high-throughput transactions in PCNs. One challenge is the payment routing algorithm design, which directly determines the success of payment transactions. Another challenge is the node operation protocol design, which can resist the offline issue and improve the cryptocurrency utilization. In this dissertation, we conduct a comprehensive study towards high-throughput cryptocurrency transactions in PCNs from optimization, game theoretic, and economic perspectives, which provides an advanced suite of algorithms, theories, and mechanisms. In particular, we study the factors that affect the transaction throughput in PCNs. For the payment routing algorithm design domain, we study the payment routing problem from the perspectives of transaction fee, transaction robustness, and channel balance. For the node operation protocol design domain, we motivate the user participation by improving node availability and cryptocurrency utilization. Extensive simulations demonstrate that our approaches can significantly improve the throughput of PCNs.
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