A Payment Mechanism for Publish-Subscribe Systems

Content-based publish-subscribe (pub-sub) networks enable a group of publishers to efficiently provide content to a large number of subscribers while allowing the subscribers to remain anonymous to the publishers. To be commercially viable, we need mechanisms for collecting payments from subscribers and distributing them fairly to publishers. This paper discusses why existing payment systems are not appropriate for pub-sub networks and proposes a probabilistic payment mechanism through an untrusted intermediary that allows publishers to trade-off efficiency for audit precision.