CLoTH: A Lightning Network Simulator

• Main Authors: Marco Conoscenti, Antonio Vetrò, Juan Carlos De Martin
• Format: Article
• Language: English
• Published: Elsevier 2021-07-01
• Series: SoftwareX
• Subjects: Lightning Network; Bitcoin; Blockchain; Payment-channel networks; Scalability; Simulator
• Online Access: http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S2352711021000613

Payment-channel networks are one of the most promising solution to the well-known issue of blockchain scalability. In this work we present CLoTH, a simulator of the Lightning Network — the mainstream payment-channel network, used in Bitcoin. CLoTH simulates the execution of payments in a payment-channel network and produces performance measures such as the probability of payment success and the average payment time. To the best of our knowledge, CLoTH is the only simulator that faithfully reproduces the Lightning Network code functions, and this ensures the reliability of simulation results. In this work we provide a detailed description of the new, refactored, publicly-usable version of CLoTH, and we show simulations on the multi-path-payment feature, a recent Lightning Network feature that aims to minimize payment failures.