PACO: Efficient Routing in Payment Channel Networks

Payment channel networks (PCNs) are indispensable solutions to the scalability issues of blockchains and act as capacity-enhancing plugins for the Bitcoin settlement mechanism. Compared to on-chain transaction processing, payment channel networks can achieve exponential throughput gains. However, the current PCNs still face bottlenecks in transaction success rates, with routing algorithms often adopting single-path payments, restricting the further development of PCNs. This paper introduces PACO, a multi-path routing algorithm based on the Ant Colony Optimization (ACO), which offers a systematic approach to initialize and update routing table probabilities for ant path-finding and subsequently selects feasible paths for final transaction amount forwarding. Experimental results demonstrate that the PACO algorithm outperforms traditional single-path routing algorithms.