A Study of Billing Schemes in an Experimental Next Generation Network

In this paper, we present a discussion concerning the performance of four network scenarios for billing purposes. Using the results of packet losses in an experimental platform simulating a NGN environment, we evaluate on each scenario the impact in the billing process with different traffic flows comparing the total revenue calculus for two billing schemes: (1) charging per packet and (2) reducing the value corresponding to undelivered packets. Our results show that the environments that use Differentiated Services are both convenient for costumers and service providers.