Coordinated Landmark-based Routing for Blockchain Offline Channels

Blockchain offline channels such as Bitcoin Light- ning network will improve the scalability of blockchains by reducing the number of transactions needed to be recorded in the blockchain. In a bi-directional offline channel, say between A and B, if A pays B .1 tokens using this channel then, the channel balance from A to B will be reduced by .1 and the channel balance from B to A will be increased by .1. Uncoordinated payment transfer in channel networks including path-based fund transfer may overuse few channels. This will lead to imbalanced channel networks where channel balance of few channels are too low to remain operational. In this paper, we propose a coordination method for landmark-based routing algorithm for fund transfer in offline channels. Our procedure allows the landmarks to route funds in complementary and non-overlapping paths which balances channel values in a bi-directional channel network. Using experimental evaluation with Bitcoin Lightning network data we prove that the proposed coordinated landmark- based routing algorithm keeps a better balance of the channels and significantly improves the success rate of fund transfer compared with existing landmark-based routing algorithms.