P2P-NetPay: a Micro-payment System for Peer-to-Peer Networks

Micro-payment systems are becoming an important part of peer-to-peer (P2P) networks. The main reason for this is to address the “free-rider” problem in most existing content sharing systems. We have developed a new micro-payment system for content sharing in P2P networks called P2P-Netpay. This is an offline, debit based protocol that provides a secure, flexible, usable and reliable credit service in peer-to-peer networks ensuring equitable participation by all parties. We have carried out an assessment of micro-payment against nonmicro-payment credit systems for file sharing applications. We report on the design of our experiment and results of an end user evaluation. We discuss the performance of our credit model compare it to a non-micro-payment credit model. Through evaluation of our proposed system and comparison with other existing systems we find that our approach eliminates the “free-rider” problem. We analyse a heuristic evaluation performed by a set of evaluators and present directions for research aiming to improve the overall satisfaction and efficiency of our model for peers.