Distributed architectures for electronic cash schemes: a survey

The volume of E-commerce transactions has considerably increased in the last several years. One of the most important aspects of such progress is the efforts made to develop and deploy dependable and secure payment infrastructures. Among these infrastructures is electronic cash, which is an attempt to reproduce the characteristics of paper cash in online transactions. Electronic cash schemes have so far been the purpose of a significant amount of research work. Although real-life deployments of such schemes are expected to take place in highly distributed environments, limited attention has been paid in the literature on underlying architectural issues. So far the focus has mostly been on addressing only security issues. However, for real-life deployment, distributed processing criteria such as performance, scalability, and availability are of prime importance. In this paper, through a survey of the literature, we identify and analyze the different distributed architectural styles underlying existing e-cash schemes. We discuss the strengths and limitations of these architectures with respect to fundamental system distribution criteria. In light of such discussion, we make some recommendations for designing effective distributed e-cash systems from an architectural perspective.