An Approach to Hardware-Supported Accounting Management in ATM-Networks

摘要: As widely accepted, ATM is one of the most important networking technologies in private and public networks. Advances in protocol implementation [Stee94, KrKS93] and hardware support for protocol processing [CaSc95b, Schi95] are beginning to overcome the performance bottleneck in the end systems. However, there is still a lack of support for efficient management and billing of high performance communication services. While accounting management is not yet a major topic in private networks, it is essential for public service providers. Up to now, many service providers perform billing based on transmitted cells, allocated bandwidth, and connection time. This type of billing is usually used in combination with strict Usage Parameter Control (UPC), where cells that violate the traffic contract are discarded by the service provider. Typically, such services provide strong guarantees for the service quality and in particular very low cell loss rates. However, there are a number of cases in which non-negligible cell loss rates occur, as, eg, for UBR (Unspecified Bit Rate) services. Conventional billing concepts similar to billing of ISDN services are not appropriate in these cases, and sophisticated management and billing support will become more and more important as low-cost low-quality ATM services are to be sold. In addition, group communication services impose even more complex requirements for the management and billing. For the establishment of alternative billing concepts, the ability to perform accounting and billing based on the actual amount of transferred information is of high importance.Within the Internet, accounting of successfully …