Performing Peer-to-Peer e-Business Transactions: A Requirements Analysis and Preliminary Design Proposal

The idea

Every online business transaction model of the time — EDI point-to-point, one-to-many, many-to-one, and the net markets that aggregate buyers and sellers around a hub — assumed a central authority to mediate: to find parties and products, to authenticate them, to dictate the business logic and to underwrite integrity, non-repudiation and privacy. Peer-to-peer architectures had by then grown well past best-effort file sharing. The paper asks what it would take to do without the hub.

Contributions

• A detailed requirements definition across the phases of a collaboration: before it — discovery of services, merchandise and trading parties, authentication, access control, negotiating parameters; during it — workflow and collaboration orchestration, logging, non-repudiation; after it — user ranking and reputation management.
• The non-functional requirements alongside them: security, availability and anonymity.
• A preliminary design built on those requirements and on implementation solutions from the literature.

What it concluded

That peer-to-peer technology had evolved far enough to fulfil many of these requirements to a large extent — with the motivating advantages being no cost or risk of owning a central server and its data, better scalability under transient populations, and ad-hoc organisation and failure recovery.