  The last decade has experienced a vast interest in Blockchain-based
cryptocurrencies with a specific focus on the applications of this technology.
However, slow confirmation times of transactions and unforeseeable high fees
hamper their wide adoption for micro-payments. The idea of establishing payment
channel networks is one of the many proposed solutions to address this
scalability issue where nodes, by utilizing smart contracting, establish
payment channels between each other and perform off-chain transactions.
However, due to the way these channels are created, both sides have a certain
one-way capacity for making transactions. Consequently, if one sides exceeds
this one-way capacity, the channel becomes useless in that particular
direction, which causes failures of payments and eventually creates an
imbalance in the overall network. To keep the payment channel network
sustainable, in this paper, we aim to increase the overall success rate of
payments by effectively exploiting the fact that end-users are usually
connected to the network at multiple points (i.e., gateways) any of which can
be used to initiate the payment. We propose an efficient method for selection
of the gateway for a user by considering the gateway's inbound and outbound
payment traffic ratio. We then augment this proposed method with split payment
capability to further increase success rate especially for large transactions.
The evaluation of the proposed method shows that compared to greedy and
maxflow-based approaches, we can achieve much higher success rates, which are
further improved with split payments.
