[Lightning-dev] Ionization Protocol: Flood Routing

Rusty Russell rusty at rustcorp.com.au
Fri Sep 25 01:53:42 UTC 2015


Amos Bairn <eylrid at gmail.com> writes:
> The obvious problem with having the whole network use the same set of
> beacons at the same time is that those nodes will get slammed. A possible
> solution is to have each user pick their own set of beacons (at random),
> but make the beacon set large enough so that any two users are likely to
> share a few. That way the all of nodes would share the load roughly evenly.

The core scaling problem is propagating current fee information (ie. the
dynamic part of route information) across the network.  That's easy with
agreed beacons.  Hard with random beacons.

Beacons are going to get slammed, but it's not clear how bad it is.
Getting slammed from all directions doesn't use up channels; it's only
computational and bandwidth limits.

Their neighbors will want to buff up, too (they'll take some load off
the beacon if both parties route through them).

A semi-realistic simulation would be interesting.  If payments cluster
by geography and some random channels are established by proximity
(ie. low latency) that may take some of load off the beacons too.

Cheers,
Rusty.


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