An Empirical Evaluation of BMSSP and Dijkstra's Algorithm for the Lightning Network
Efficient routing is critical for payment channel networks (PCNs) such as the Lightning Network (LN), where shortest-path computations are commonly performed using Dijkstra-based algorithms. Recent theoretical work introduced the Bounded Multi-Source Shortest Path (BMSSP) algorithm, which achieves an asymptotically faster running time than Dijkstra's algorithm on sparse directed graphs. This paper presents an empirical evaluation of BMSSP on real-world LN topology snapshots and compares its performance with a standard Dijkstra implementation written in Rust. Across five LN snapshots and 100 randomized source-node trials per snapshot, BMSSP consistently exhibited higher runtimes than Dijkstra's algorithm, with statistically significant differences observed in all evaluated datasets. These findings indicate that, for current LN graph sizes and the implementations studied, BMSSP does not provide practical runtime advantages despite its stronger asymptotic guarantees. Rather than demonstrating a routing acceleration technique, this work contributes an LN-specific empirical case study of a recently proposed shortest-path algorithm and highlights the gap between theoretical complexity improvements and practical performance on contemporary payment-channel-network topologies.