The design and implementation of policy-based bandwidth billing system

This paper presents a billing system for the network with multiple service levels, the 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 applied into many 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 change in 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 the result indicates that the proposed system is practical.