Metering and Accounting for Composite e-Services

Software services are emerging as the dominant component technology for creating distributed applications, deployed over the Internet. Using standardized service interfaces, clients can remotely access value-added functionality or resources offered by service providers. As more and more software services are deployed for e-commerce applications, they will usually be fee-based. Usage metering and Accounting thus form important management components of a commercial e-services infrastructure. The metering and accounting problem takes on added complexity with composite e-services -- higher-level services that are built using simpler underlying services, each of which may be independently owned and operated. In this paper we present an architecture for the metering and accounting of composite service usage. We analyze e-services and their composition, from the perspective of usage metering, charging and business models. After describing our architecture, we report on a prototype design and implementation. Market economics-driven issues such as pricing and billing are not addressed here, since the focus of this paper is on the systems infrastructure.