Coins in cloud drives can use OAuth for micropayments and resource metering alike

Abstract

Resource metering in distributed environments is notoriously difficult. In clouds, the metering technology has to be distributed by design. This paper shows that the technology used for (financial) micropayments fulfills several objectives of the new metering process once the concept of money is replaced with the concept of a resource. Like in micropayments, resource metering in clouds is often a 3-party relationship like that among cloud provider, service provider and customer. The technology proposed in this paper can be viewed both as a better alternative to traditional micropayments as well as a new way to meter resource usage in clouds.