An electronic payment system architecture for composite payment transactions

The inherent component in most commercial transactions and services is payment. Automation of business processes from the start state to the end state is a challenging task, particularly when multiple payments and multiple organizations (parties) are involved. Usually, a single payment transaction involves many atomic transactions. These atomic transactions may be spread over different databases belonging to different organizations across the globe. Though most of the business transaction protocols support ACID properties, all payment transactions may not support classical ACID properties, which are mainly based on nothing-or-all protocol. In this paper, we introduce a selective two-phase commit protocol over business transaction protocol (BTP), which reverses only the failed atomic transactions, allowing the partial commit of the composite payment transaction. Further, a general framework is proposed for secure electronic payment services over Internet, especially when multiple parties are involved.