Raiden Network: Scalable routing

Scalable routing

The biggest problem is how to find the path from sender to receiver without a global view of all channels and their availability and capacity. An efficient but centralized solution is to allow all participants to continuously report their channel capacity to a centralized service, and then ask the service to obtain the path. A decentralized but inefficient alternative is to enforce the path through trial and error or broadcast channel updates to all participants. An efficient routing model exists through the so-called "small world" network, but it requires dynamic connections between nodes. A viable system needs to find a balance among these methods.

Maintain a balanced network/cost

The path finding algorithm should not give an arbitrary path, but find the ideal path that reduces or at least avoids the increase of intermediary channels, which leads to the unbalanced distribution of network channels. This can be achieved by announcing fees by participants to incentivize everyone to find the cheapest path, and also implicitly help the network to maintain balance. The simulation results show that increasing the cost and increasing the unbalanced ratio of channel distribution greatly increases the life of the channel.