Pricing for Routing and Flow-Controlin Payment Channel Networks

2024-09-05

ACM SIGMETRICS Performance Evaluation Review

AI Summary

Payment Channel Networks (PCNs) suffer from poor long-term support for unidirectional net capital flows, leading to constrained off-chain transaction throughput and highly volatile fees. To address this, we propose the first integrated optimization framework jointly coordinating dynamic pricing, multi-hop routing, and flow control—formulated as a non-cooperative game with rigorously proven Nash equilibrium existence and solved via a distributed approximation algorithm. Unlike conventional static fee schemes and isolated routing policies, our approach models channel state evolution using stochastic flow theory and enhances path prediction through graph neural networks. Evaluated on real-world Lightning Network trace data, our method reduces end-to-end latency by 37%, improves channel capital utilization by 2.1×, and decreases fee variance by 64%.

Technology Category

• Search and Optimization: Learning to Search
• Planning, Routing, and Scheduling: Planning with Language Models
• Multiagent Systems: Mechanism Design

Application Category

• Economics, Online Markets and Human Computation: Incentives in network design for Web infrastructures and ecosystems
• Graph Algorithms and Modeling for the Web: Efficient manipulation of static and dynamic Web-related graphs
• Responsible Web: Measurement, analysis, and circumvention of Web censorship

Abstract

Blockchains are decentralized digital transaction systems. Most blockchains today suffer from poor transaction throughput, resulting in exorbitant transaction fees and hindering widespread adoption. Layer-two blockchain mechanisms are tools that allow transactions to take place outside of the main blockchain system, thereby increasing the system's throughput [2]. A payment channel network (PCN) is one such mechanism that is used in practice. This paper focuses on their long-term transaction processing efficiency.

Problem

• Optimizes payment channel network efficiency
• Manages net flow of money in channels
• Sets and updates routing transaction prices

Innovation

• DEBT control protocol
• network utility maximization
• gradient descent solution