CLoTH: a Simulator for HTLC Payment Networks
This work addresses the need for better tools to analyze and improve off-chain scaling solutions for Bitcoin, though it is incremental as it builds on existing network concepts.
The authors tackled the problem of simulating HTLC payment networks like the Lightning Network to predict performance issues and optimization effects, resulting in the development of CLoTH, a simulator that produces statistics such as payment completion time and failure probability.
The Lightning Network (LN) is one of the most promising off-chain scaling solutions for Bitcoin, as it enables off-chain payments which are not subject to the well-known blockchain scalability limit. In this work, we introduce CLoTH, a simulator for HTLC payment networks, of which LN is the best working example. It simulates input-defined payments on an input-defined HTLC network and produces performance measures in terms of payment-related statistics, such as time to complete payments and probability of payment failure. CLoTH helps to predict issues that might arise in the development of an HTLC payment network, and to estimate the effects of an optimisation before deploying it. In upcoming works we'll publish the results of CLoTH simulations.