The Design of a Generic Service-oriented Cost Model for Service Providers in the Internet (COSMOS)

The rapid evolution of the Internet requires a fundamental reshaping of cost models for Internet Service Providers (ISP) in order to facilitate their internal cost management and to provide a solid service-oriented basis for tariff and charge calculation. This paper presents a generic ISP cost model (COSMOS) whose design is strictly oriented towards reallife scenarios, but at the same time aims at a general semiformal representation. The application of suitable abstraction principles in terms of cost categories, cost locations and cost units yields a modified Internet-specific full cost accounting. COSMOS has been implemented and applied to a case study comprising different Internet services on the backbone network between all major scientific sites in Switzerland. Various importance and sensitivity analyses provide a deep insight into cost structures and potential cost bulls. In this way the flexibility and adaptability of the model to given service-orientated scenarios eventually is demonstrated.