Charging and accounting in high-speed networks

The commercialization of the Internet and the requirement to offer various different network services for emerging applications has driven the development of appropriate Internet technology, such as the differentiated services architecture. However, these developments focussed on the technological point of view only, neglecting the need to provide economic incentives to users and customers to chose the "right" service class. Once accepted that charging Internet services is an economically valid approach, suitable charging technology is required. Therefore, this paper motivates and introduces a suitable Internet charging system. In addition, the development of incentive-compatible pricing models for multi-service networks determines the corresponding economic question. The problem of today's flat rates shows, that high-speed networks are priced simply and customers like them, however, Internet service providers tend to show a severe economic instability in the market, while technologies emerge on a fast time-scale. Therefore, a better than flat fee approach termed cumulus pricing scheme is introduced, solving the feasibility problem of pricing Internet services. This work addresses the design and implementation of suitable Internet charging technology as well as design of a novel pricing scheme, which extends the flat rate scheme with a feedback, both of which determine advantages over existing approaches. (C) 2002 Elsevier Science B.V. All rights reserved.