An Efficient Accounting Architecture for QoS-aware Internet Traffic

04/09/23 Nebraska WINDS Lab, University of Nebraska at Omaha

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Abdelnasser M. Abdelaal and Hesham H. AliDepartment of Computer Science

College of Information Science and TechnologyUniversity of Nebraska at Omaha

Omaha, NE 68182{aabdelaal | hali}@mail.unomaha.edu

An Efficient Accounting Architecture for QoS-aware Internet Traffic


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Outline

Introduction Why Internet accounting? Challenges of Internet accounting Previous work The proposed Internet accounting architecture E-Business applications Conclusion and future directions


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Introduction

What is Internet accounting ? An architecture to meter and report users’ usages for

network resources.


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Why Internet accounting ?

A tool to influence user behavior Illustrates the user/provider relation Allows for service differentiation Allows for efficient resource allocation ISPs want accounting for charging, revenue sharing,

and management


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Why Internet Accounting? Cont.

Required for billing, revenue sharing, and resource management among ISPs


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Why Internet accounting ?, Cont.

Reasons for QoS-aware Internet Accounting : Increasing pervasive computing The emergence of content-based applications Increasing VoIP and real-time applications Diversity of QoS requirements The features of the foreseen 4G networks


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Challenges of Internet Accounting

Can you make a difference between local, national and international traffic?

Can you distinguish inter and intra traffic? Can you do accounting when (e.g. ) Retransmission is

involved ? What is the influence of future developments ?


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Challenges of Internet Accounting, Cont.

Who are involved in the accounting process ? How will it be ‘organized’? What accounting information needs to be exchanged among

ISPs/operators ? At what level is accounting possible/needed (users or

aggregates)? IP addresses do not indicate the identity and the location of

the user


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Previous work

The Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF) has few Internet accounting working groups The Real-Time Traffic Flow Measurement (RTFM) accounting

architecture. The Cisco Netflow accounting server:

Collects the IP addresses, flow duration, number of packets and bytes for each flow, used protocol, class of service, etc

Does not support real-time routing Its accounting process is based on randomized samples of the system

traffic. Packet based Per-hop behavior (PHB) Not end-to-end tracing.

Developing eBusiness applications such as QoS-aware billing based on a PHB or randomized samples is not reliable.


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Previous work, Cont.

The Authorization, authentication, and accounting (AAA) architecture: Collects and reports information such as users’ identities, executed

commands, number of bytes, number of packets, consumed resources, and connection start and end time.

Redundancy in calculating the number of packets and the number of bytes for each flow .

Other architectures: DIAMETER, RADIUS, and ATM server.

Disadvantages of current accounting architectures No QoS tracing No end-to-end property Per hop behavior


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Internet accounting applications: Billing

The NZGate (New Zealand Gate Way) billing server Identifies incoming flows from outgoing flows Adapts the concept of committed traffic volume based on which

subscribers are charged. Offers a 30% discount for low priority traffic (e.g. emails, FTP) and

an 80% discount for off- peak usages. Informs subscribers about the costs and the benefits of different

usage options so that they could budget for their usages. The Monash University billing and accounting server

Does not charge students and faculty who use the server’s mailing system, but it charges them if they use any external mailing system such as Hotmail or Yahoo.

Pilot billing server: Uses users authentications to charge them based on call duration.


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The Proposed Internet Accounting Approach


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The proposed efficiency framework

Efficiency criteria : Optimal grain size:

Collect packet, link, or flow information End-to-end tracing

Facilitates ISPs settlements. For low operational cost

Fairness: Different QoS requirements Content-based applications among users and ISPs

Completeness: Collects the necessary information

No redundancy:


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Assumptions and simulation environment

Assumptions: Each connection is only one flow. All flows require the same amount of resources All flows have the same distance. The required QoS is 0% PDR. Fixed committed delay 1ns per packet

Simulation environment: IntServ and MS call admission control model in ns-2.26 Single source single distention. 10BT link with exponential traffic pattern The simulation time is 3000 Sec.


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The proposed architecture

Collected parameters

Link utilizationConnection admission and rejection rateAverage call durationQoS

Call durationStart and end time Call QoS

Packet drop ratePacket delay

Per-flow parameters Packet parametersLink parameters

Internet Accounting


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Link utilization level and accounting parameters

Link utilization, call admission and rejection rate, call lifetime, packet drop rate related to utilization target


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Link utilization level and accounting parameters

Call admission and rejection related to link utilization


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Per-flow treatment and accounting, Cont.

Per-flow parameters


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Per-flow treatment and accounting, Cont.

Flows which have different lifetimes should be treated differently


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eBusiness applications

Link parameters: Expansion and investment plans. Congestion control and traffic classification ( e.g. peak

traffic, off-peak traffic) Price differentiation (e.g., content, QoS requirements),

incentives. service enforcement for prepaid services. Minimize accounting cost transactions Entra-domain settlements, security analysis, distributed

resource allocation, traffic control, revenue sharing, and dispute resolution.


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eBusiness applications, Cont.

Per-flow parameters: e-Auctions and stock quote services ( start and end time for

each flow) Targeting misbehaving and unresponsive flows Flow-based pricing congestion control Content-based billing and reverse charging. Network management and efficient resource allocation


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Conclusion and future directions

The contribution of this paper is twofold: Efficiency framework for accounting architectures:

Optimal grain size, End-to-end tracing, Fairness, Completeness, Non-redundancy.

An efficient Internet accounting architecture whose parameters: Per-link parameters with respect to end-to-end QoS

requirements and path characteristics Per-flow parameters Per-packet parameters.


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Conclusion and future directions, Cont.

Advantages of the proposed architecture: Low operational overhead. Appropriate for several eBusiness applications and network

management tools Suitable for the next generation networks.

Future research: Optimizing the accounting measuring and reporting

mechanisms in the wireless domain. Investigating the scalability of accounting architectures Considering other QoS parameters such as packet jitter and

service security.