Billing system for Internet Service Provider (ISP)

The main objective of this paper is proposing and developing a billing system used by Internet Service Providers (ISPs) to charge Internet users according to their network usage (e.g. their traffic). This means that, depending on the volume of traffic created by users they will be charged. The main idea of the proposed billing system is when a user attempts to establish a connection with the outside world, the connection establishment will be postponed while the user is authenticated and verifying that he is ready to pay for this connection. Generally, if the user is ready to pay, the connection will be established and his traffic (which reflects his usage) will be metered. An invoice is generated according to the metered traffic. The proposed billing system consists of two main components, which are the meter module and invoice generation module. We measure several key statistics as connection setup time, active connection count, response time and complexity of searching the connection tables without the billing system and with it to determine if it is feasible to implement the proposed billing system or not.