BARTER: A backbone ARchitecture for trade of ElectRonic content

BARTER is a scalable, highly-available and efficient electronic commerce system that facilitates digital content trade over an open network. BARTER is designed to operate over a large-scale, global and heterogeneous communication network infrastructure. The BARTER protocols address two vital requirements from an electronic commerce system, neglected from existing systems: scalability and transactional efficiency. BARTER suggests three basic protocols, offering different levels of trust in the system. BARTER'S novelty is twofold: First, by distributing signature verification away from BARTER servers, the overhead of online transaction processing is reduced by orders of magnitude. Nevertheless, this does not sacrifice strong security requirements, namely the ability to aggregate transaction commitments and to resolve disputes. Second, BARTER integrates scalability considerations into several system components that are likely to suffer service degradation in a world-wide setting. These components are the authentication subsystem, the account management subsystem, and the maintenance of global data (such as transaction identifier lists). In addressing these issues, BARTER takes into account the inherent asynchronous, unreliable, insecure and failureprone environment assumptions. We contend that by employing service distribution, BARTER is expected to scale well, meeting the demands of a world-wide setting, over which it is intended to operate.