Practical compact multi-coupon systems

Electronic coupons have been accepted as a useful means in e-commerce. Multi-coupons are a special type of coupons, which are more efficient than single coupons in practice. So far, the application of multi-coupon systems is plagued by two main issues, i.e. how to provide efficient and flexible mechanism for redeeming, and how to implement the issuing protocol efficiently. In this paper, we give a solution to these problems by putting forward two practical compact multi-coupon systems. It is worth noting that the new systems support three kinds of redeeming, i.e. regular redeeming, compact redeeming and batch redeeming. It can be proved that the new systems fulfill all the essential properties of a multi-coupon system. Moreover, we propose an efficient verification algorithm for the second system by incorporating the state of the art techniques of batch verification.