LNMesh: Who Said You need Internet to send Bitcoin? Offline Lightning Network Payments using Community Wireless Mesh Networks

Bitcoin is undoubtedly a great alternative to today’s existing digital payment systems. Even though Bitcoin’s scalability has been debated for a long time, we see that it is no longer a concern thanks to its layer-2 solution Lightning Network (LN). LN has been growing non-stop since its creation and enabled fast, cheap, anonymous, censorship-resistant Bitcoin transactions. However, as known, LN nodes need an active Internet connection to operate securely which may not be always possible. For example, in the aftermath of natural disasters or power outages, users may not have Internet access for a while. Thus, in this paper, we propose LNMesh which enables offline LN payments on top of wireless mesh networks. Users of a neighborhood or a community can establish a wireless mesh network to use it as an infrastructure to enable offline LN payments when they do not have any Internet connection. As such, we first present proof-of-concept implementations where we successfully perform offline LN payments utilizing Bluetooth Low Energy and WiFi. For larger networks with more users where users can also move around, channel assignments in the network need to be made strategically and thus, we propose 1) minimum connected dominating set; and 2) uniform spanning tree based channel assignment approaches. Finally, to test these approaches, we implemented a simulator in Python along with the support of BonnMotion mobility tool. We then extensively tested the performance metrics of large-scale realistic offline LN payments on mobile wireless mesh networks. Our simulation results show that, success rates up to %95 are achievable with the proposed channel assignment approaches when channels have enough liquidity.

I. Introduction

When Bitcoin [1] was introduced in 2009, it created a big sensation in the world as it was first of its kind. Since then, a lot of different cryptocurrencies were proposed. Today, cryptocurrencies can be used to pay for goods and services similar to using cash or credit cards. However, none of them could replace or supersede Bitcoin in usage or market capitalization. Current market conditions still implie that it will stay the same way [2].