Abstract
The guarantee of Quality of Service (QoS) on the IP network is becoming an important issue in recent years. The pricing schemes currently used by the Internet Service Providers (ISPs) are flat rate pricing and duration-based pricing, and both cannot be applied to the network with multiple service levels. The service providers have an urgent demand for a proper billing system that can charge the users for different service levels provide by the service providers. This paper presents a Policy-based bandwidth billing system (PBBS), which not only bills users for their consumed services and bandwidth resources but also controls and guarantees the QoS classes required by the users over IP networks. The Policy-based pricing scheme adopted by PBBS can be molded into all kinds of pricing schemes such as flat rate pricing, duration-based pricing, volume-based pricing, service-based pricing, schedule-based pricing, or online-bandwidth-based pricing. The PBBS is based on the Policy-based bandwidth management system and achieves the billing and bandwidth controlling according to the Policies made by the network providers and users. The system requires no changes to the existing protocols and applications and can be used to bill and manage multiple domains simultaneously. An implementation of PBBS based on the BandKeeper system is described and indicates that the system is practical.