Suitable pricing models for Internet services represent one of the main prerequisites for a successfully running implementation of a charging and accounting tool. This paper introduces general aspects influencing the choice of a pricing model and presents a survey of relevant approaches to be found in the scientific literature. Based on cost model investigations some detailed insight into price and cost issues from an Internet Service Provider's (ISP) point of view is given. Moreover, current challenges as well as problems are discussed in a practical context as investigated in the Swiss National Science Foundation project CATI -- Charging and Accounting Technology for the Internet.

Auctions are a widely used approach for determining the current market price for congested resources. However, using them for real systems, such as the Internet, the auction algorithms require modifications as soon as connections cover links from more than one Internet Service Provider. This paper presents work in progress on two new auction schemes that have been designed to overcome this problem. 1 Introduction As current developments are driving the Internet more and more towards commercial use, the question of charging users for using the Internet has become of rapidly increasing importance. The last years have seen a couple of proposals for pricing models for communication services (for a summarizing overview cf., e.g., [1]). Unfortunately, most of them remain on a rather theoretical level, without paying too much attention to practical problems, such as implementability with minimized overhead or scalability in tomorrow's Internet architecture, and as they are tackled, e.g., wi...

Bandwidth brokers as proposed in the diffserv framework build on the process of setting up Service Level Agreements (SLA). This is a very static procedure, usually performed manually and based only on a simple description of the SLA. However, diffserv is suited to handle a more dynamic environment and to provide more than connectivity with its service classes. Our proposal enhances bandwidth brokers by including more significant information in SLAs such as the flow's destination network and pricing. In addition, we present a new per-hop behavior that supports flexible allocation of code points which is important to our approach. The system is targeted at large ISPs with good inter-connectivity. We implemented it on top of a flow-based simulation engine. The evaluation is based on parts of the current AS topology and characteristics of aggregated traffic. The results show an improvement of network utilization by up to 40% over a traditional, shortest-path routed inter-domain network for...

Suitable pricing models for Internet services represent one of the main prerequisites for a successfully running implementation of a charging and accounting system. This paper introduces general aspects influencing the choice of a pricing model in practical situations and presents a survey as well as a classification of relevant and advanced approaches to be found in the scientific literature. First performance results on charging extensions within the Internet are presented, which are completed by a set of market price simulations for dynamic pricing models within the same implementation environment. Based on cost model investigations some detailed insights into price and cost issues from an Internet Service Provider's (ISP) point of view are given. Moreover, current challenges as well as problems are discussed in a practical context as investigated in the Swiss National Science Foundation project Charging and Accounting Technology for the Internet (CATI). Keywords: Internet Pricing,...

Valuable high-end communication services cannot be assigned in a cooperative fashion, they must be rather granted on grounds of economic admission policies. Usagebased pricing models for an integrated services Internet have been proposed, but on a theoretical level only. In this paper, a control protocol for charging and accounting resource reservations in the integrated services Internet is presented, highlighting implementation issues and performance aspects with such usage-based pricing models. The general design decisions as well as a first implementation are described. They are based on a simple version of the resource reservation protocol RSVP. The pricing models employed were (1) an auction-based pricing model (delta auction) and (2) an adaptive, load-sensitive, volume pricing model. The protocol can handle these pricing models concurrently, i.e., it supports local pricing decisions. Furthermore, sender and receiver of a connection can share the cost of a transmission. Finally, the prototype implementation was used to obtain first results and measurements concerning the overhead in terms of network and computing resources. Processing overhead for large number of flows and dynamic pricing schemes was measured at less than 2.3% and protocol overhead is typically 0.75%.

When reservation-based service differentiation is offered in an IP network, it is crucial for a network provider to appropriately charge for service invocations. For internal calculation as well as external price representation, a notion of costs and prices for communication services is needed. In this paper, general requirements for cost and price calculation are analysed for packetswitched multi-service networks. We conclude that internal price calculation should be linear, based on resource usage and uniform across multiple service classes. Accordingly, we specify refinements for service class definitions and present a price calculation method for the IETF's Integrated Services architecture. The application of such a price representation to existing pricing and charging approaches is shown. Finally, certain economic aspects of the Guaranteed service class are analysed and the results are expressed using linear price representation.

Packet-switched network technology is expected to form the integration layer for future multi-service networks. The trend to integrate voice and data traffic can already be observed in the Internet and is expected to carry on until the full integration of all media types is achieved. At the same time it becomes obvious that the business model employed for current Internet usage is probably not sustainable for the creation of an infrastructure suitable to support a diverse and ever-increasing range of application services. Currently, the Internet provides only a single class of best-effort service and prices are mainly built on flat-fee, access-based schemes. However, the large and increasing differentiation of demand for quality of transmission services creates the necessity to differentiate service provision and, consequently, charging for network communications. In this article, we survey relevant service models and motivate the need for appropriate charging mechanisms. We give an overview on requirements for a charging system, its technical components, and issues for future business models that might by employed by service providers.

The Differentiated Services architecture allows a service provider to configure new services dynamically using a policy protocol. This benefit, however, may not be fully realized if the service provider can not charge for the services, or need a high effort to update its billing system to charge for the services. Thus, there is a real need for a flexible billing architecture to complement the flexibility offered by the differentiated service model. To meet this need, a policy-based billing architecture is proposed in this paper. This architecture allows a service provider to define policies for configuring various processes of a billing system based on the charging and pricing schemes used for individual services. It is demonstrated how the architecture supports flat-rate, duration-based and volume-based charging, and also both static and dynamic pricing. Definitions of policies for various charging and pricing schemes are discussed and the potential complexity of each of them is analy...

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Pricing schemes for Internet services have turned out to be of crucial influence for thecom!B!;"8EJR;q of Internet Service Providers (ISP). Despite of this urgentdemANN there is still no standard tariff schem that solves the so-called "feasibility problemJ i.e. ensures simq!B"8!//;q technical feasibility, economE efficiency and user acceptance. This paper investigates the reason for the apparent shortage of "new schemE under the sun"and deals with the inherent timJ;!!"8 based structure of Internet pricing schem/A Tariffs are viewed in term ofm"/qJN" between differenttim;JBA"8! that can be expressed in theform of Tariff Matrices with a particular tridiagonal form It turns out that all established proposals fit perfectly into the resulting fram work, and that on the other hand there is no room for novel approaches left until a new (temNE al)dimBEJ!" is added. Introducing thedimAREJE of "delay of charging"into the fram work gives rise to acom pletely new class ofdynamN tariffs, as is shown bym"AE of two prom/NE! examNB/ for the resulting schemA; i.e. the Cum"A; Pricing Schem (CPS) for the Differentiated Service (DiffServ) architecture and the Connection-Holder-is-Preferred -Schem (CHiPS) for dynamic multiprovider auctions.