A prepaid service-based charging and billing protocol for Internet services

The explosive growth of Internet services makes ISPs necessitate a flexible and practical service-based charging model to promote various services in an increasingly competitive market. Much research has focused on transport-based charging that meters traffic volume or time duration as usage parameters. However, charging only for the transport negates the perceived value of the content and neglects the atomic nature of some services. In this paper, we present a prepaid service-based charging and billing protocol extended from the Remote Access Dial-In User Service (RADIUS) protocol because of its extensibility and deployments by a wide range of existing vendors. The proposed charging model classifies services into atomic service and divisible service. The atomic service is charged all or nothing based on the transmission status; the divisible service is charged in proportion to the service duration. This research also suggests charging Internet services by prepaid business model. The prepaid model attracts both the operators and the customers. The operators have the ability to monitor subscribers spending and prevent subscribers from using services they cannot afford real-time. The customers have the opportunity to control their own spending and take a limited amount of risk.