Author: ZmnSCPxj 2020-02-07 04:11:03
Published on: 2020-02-07T04:11:03+00:00
The proposed Ant Routing system aims to reduce the size of routemaps and eliminate distinctions between published and unpublished channels. However, there are some considerations that need addressing. A surveillance node can determine upper bounds on distance to both a payer and payee by matching the payee seed pheromone and the payer seed pheromone. This issue can be fixed by having just the payee broadcast the pheromone, which preserves the privacy of both the payer and payee. Ant Routing has a big weakness in that having a single pheromone seed recognizable for the entire path prevents implementing any kind of path decorrelation. Confirming the path length is an additional step that can be elided by recognizing that the timelock component of the PTLC/HTLC routing must decrement at each hop. Routing failures seem harder to handle, as it would be pointless to reveal which node actually failed to forward because the payer itself does not know the whole path to the payee. A major objection against Ant Routing is that it requires every payment to have a pheromone broadcasted, sending out data that reaches each and every node on the network. The proposed system sends data proportional to p payments to n nodes or O(pn), whereas current source routing sends data proportional to p payments to a constant limit of nodes or O(p). In conclusion, while Ant Routing has some benefits, constant factors are still much lower with Ant Routing and it may remain practical.
Updated on: 2023-06-02T23:33:47.379336+00:00