Comparing and Contrasting Micro-payment Models for Content Sharing in P2P Networks

Micro-payment systems have the potential to provide non-intrusive, high-volume and low-cost pay-as-you-use services for a wide variety of web-based applications. We proposed a new model, P2P-NetPay, a micro-payment protocol characterized by off-line processing, suitable for peer-to-peer network service charging. P2P micro-payment systems must provide a secure, highly efficient, flexible, usable and reliable environment, the key issues in P2P micro-payment systems development. Therefore, in order to assist in the design of an efficient micro-payment model suitable for P2P networks, we compare and contrast several existing P2P micro-payment models in this paper and outline a new P2P micro-payment scheme we have been developing that addresses the disadvantages in current schemes.

1. Introduction

Peer to peer systems (P2P) have emerged as a significant social and technical phenomenon over the last few years. A peer-to-peer architecture is a network where one peer exchanges resources with other peers as required without heavy use of a central server. A P2P network can be described as a self-organising, decentralised network where each participating node can elect to consume as well as provide services and/or resources concurrently.