Towards a Scalable System for Per-Flow Charging in the Internet

The provision of guaranteed Quality of Service (QoS) in the Internet requires appropriate system support for both resource allocation and charging. Differentiated Services is an approach for the former which targets a high level of scalability. The inclusion of flow-based charging characteristics, such as QoS, extent of service usage and traffic destination dependencies, into Differentiated Service models requires specific system components including destination related price tables, traffic counters and specific control schemes for inter-provider service agreements. In this paper, we describe and evaluate these components with respect to the their spatial and temporal scalability. For the latter, an evaluation model is developed based on simulations and simulation results are provided indicating performance trade-offs.