Policy-based billing architecture for Internet differentiated services

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 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 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. Definitions of policies for various charging and pricing schemes are discussed and the potential complexity of each of them is analyzed. Based on the complexity analysis four classes of services, which utilize the least complex charging schemes and require the minimum traffic metering effort, are recommended for meeting different application requirements.