Towards Universally Acceptable m-Com Protocol

Online trust is growing in importance. Consumers and businesses, feeling the pressure of economic downturn and terrorism, increasingly look to buy from and do business with the most trusted Web sites. Companies’ perception of customer trust has steadily evolved from being a construct involving security and privacy issues to a multidimensional, complex construct that includes credibility, emotional comfort and quality. Further, trust online spans the end-to-end aspects of ebusiness rather than being just based on the electronic storefront. The increasing popularity of electronic commerce has necessitated the development of, robust, reliable, efficient and secure e-commerce protocols. These protocols should not only ensure the confidentiality and integrity of information exchanged, but researchers have identified other desirable properties, such as, money atomicity, goods atomicity and validated receipt, that must be satisfied by e-commerce protocols. In the traditional scenario of physical goods, one can order the goods and transfer money over the network, but the goods cannot be delivered over the network. Whereas Informational goods have the special characteristic that both the delivery of goods and money can accomplished over the same network infrastructure. This paper summarizes analyses and compares five of the most emerging ecommerce protocols for micro transactions. These protocols are NetBill, Payword, Micromint, Millicent and MPTP. Analysis of these protocols is done on the basis of eight crucial parameters which are Computational Cost, Communication Cost, Storage Cost, Privacy, Reliability, Repudiation, online/offline scheme and trust.