A Secure Billing Protocol for Grid Computing

Grid computing has contributed to advances in computational and communication technologies, which has made economically feasible the conglomeration of multiple clusters of heterogeneous networked resources and services that, in turn, has lead to the development of large-scale distributed systems. However, available resources may be shortage. We propose a secure delivery and billing protocol between service provider and resource consumer designed not only to make sure that the communication protocol will be subject to no malicious attacks but also to provide mutual authentication for business transactions. Our strategy can be used within a wide variety of applications with relatively few modifications to the super-peer protocol while only causing slight increases in readily ignorable traffic.