FSTR: Funds Skewness Aware Transaction Routing for Payment Channel Networks

Payment channel is an effective and popular technique to improve the scalability and throughput of blockchains by transferring transactions from on-chain to off-chain. Multiple payment channels can constitute a payment network and realize transaction execution via multi-hop paths. How to find a feasible and efficient transaction path, i.e., transaction routing, is a key issue in payment channel networks, and different solutions have been proposed. However, the problem of funds skewness, which may cause routing failures, has been largely ignored in existing routing algorithms. In this work, we design FSTR, a routing algorithm that attempts to route transactions using a funds skewness based path selection scheme so as to reduce funds skewness and increase transaction success probability. To evaluate the performance of FSTR, we conduct experiments using the real-world dataset of Ripple. The experiment results show that FSTR outperforms existing routing algorithms, in terms of success ratio, delay, and overhead.