CE Club Seminar - Demand-Aware Optimization in Offchain Networks

#Offchain #networks #scalability #blockchain #systems #payment #channels,offchain #topology

Offchain networks are dominant as a solution to the scalability problem of blockchain systems, allowing users to perform payments without their recording on the chain by relying on predefined payment channels. Users together with the offchain channels form a graph, known as the offchain network topology. A pair of users can employ a payment even without a direct channel through a path of channels involving other intermediate users. The offchain topology and payment characteristics affect network performance such as latency and fees.

We study basic demand-aware problems in offchain network design: Efficiently mapping users to an offchain topology of a known structure as well as constructing a topology of a bounded number of channels that can serve well typical payments. Likewise, we suggest an approach for jointly serving multiple payments by finding an equivalent set of payments that has the same impact on user balance but can be served efficiently in a given topology.