The micropayment system is one of the most crucial requirements for electronic commerce of information goods over the Internet. The micropayment system is designed to support purchases costing small amount of money. Most of micropayment systems consist of three parts, pre-calculation, purchase-payment loop and redemption. Since purchase-payment loop is the most frequently executed part of the three micropayment procedure, it is important to improve efficiency of the purchase-payment loop.
In this thesis, we propose a new micropayment system which has less computation cost of the purchase-payment loop over existing systems. Especially, we design a user-specific currency using one-way hash function. The currency used in the proposed micropayment system is generated by each user in the form of a chain of hash values. The cost to establish a new relationship between a customer and a vendor is reduced through batch distribution of the currency to each vendor via broker.
Performance of the proposed micropayment system is evaluated by analysis. Analysis results show that the proposed micropayment system requires shorter user latency and less vendor computation time than those of other micropayment systems, especially when new relationship establishment between a customer and a vendor is frequently required.
