Charging of Multimedia Flows in an Integrated Services Network

Admission to communication services for multimedia applications does not imply purely technical control, it has to integrate economic admission policies as well. This is mainly due to the fact that multimedia communication services within the Internet cannot be assigned in a cooperative fashion as they represent bandwidth-hungry applications. Internet economics make various assumptions on pricing policies and services, encompassing features of the economic model, the pricing mechanism, the network model, and their practicability in the Internet today. Based on general architectural aspects for integrating and supporting charging and accounting properties of integrated services networks, the implementation of a flow-based approach to charge multimedia data in the Internet is presented. Ongoing work in the design, implementation, and evaluation of a control protocol for charging and accounting resource reservations in the integrated services Internet applies usage-based pricing models employing an auction-based pricing model (delta auction) and an adaptive, load-sensitive, volume pricing model. In contrast to packet-based charging schemes, the developed approach of flow-based charging features low processing overhead and low bandwidth requirements of less than 1% for finegrained and frequent reservation setups are achieved.