Evaluating a micro-payment system for mobile electronic commerce

As an increasing number of people use wireless communication to purchase goods and services, we have developed a new micropayment system called M&E-NetPay for mobile electronic commerce. This system has open interoperability and mobility, uses Web services to inter-connect brokers and vendors, and provides secure, flexible, usable, and reliable credit services over the Internet. M&E-NetPay makes use of a secure, cheap, available, and debit based off-line protocol that allows vendors to interact only with customers after an initial validation of coins. To validate the system, we have conducted an evaluation of the system performance. The results demonstrate that by using fast hashing functions that validate e-coin unspent indexes, M&E-NetPay achieves secure transactions with a high volume per item. It was also confirmed that the .Net framework architecture 4.0 with Web Services used in M&E-NetPay improves client-to-server communications, leading to high system performance. We report on this evaluation in this paper.