[Lightning-dev] Measuring centrality of nodes in LN graph

[Kulpreet Singh]

Hi all,

I have been thinking about how we could measure the centrality of
various nodes in the LN graph and the dependence on some nodes to
route payments and to prevent network partitions. I think measuring
and tracking the changes in key metrics could help the community
decide on which nodes to open new channels with.

I measured the centrality of nodes and the central point dominance as
defined in the seminal paper by Lindon C. Freeman, "A Set of Measures
of Centrality Based on Betweenness", Sociometry 40, pp. 35-41, 1977.

I also measured the number of articulation points in the network as
per Robert E. Tarjan, "Depth first search and linear graph algorithms"
SIAM Journal on Computing, 1(2):146-160, 1972.

I want to add, that this is just a start, I understand that we should
probably look at treating LN as a directed graph and that we should do
some work in trying to do some analysis based on treating LN as a flow
network.

However, I am eager to share my early results and would welcome any
feedback or suggestions on the way forward.

I wrote a medium post describing the approach and show my results
there. I also elaborate on the choice of the two metrics and what they
mean for LN. The post is available here:
https://medium.com/@jungly/measuring-node-centrality-in-lightning-network-8102a59999f0

Looking forward to your suggestions and feedback.

Thanks
Kulpreet