Charging and Accounting Technology for the Internet The CATI Project:

Recent studies show that much of Electronic Commerce activities will be conducted via the Internet, such activities encompassing business-business as well as client-business and administration-business relationships. However, the Internet has not been designed to support such activities and it lacks many features, as Quality of Service requirements or Charging and Accounting facilities. At the beginning of 1998, the Swiss National Science Foundation (SNF) launched a priority program on Electronic Commerce. In the framework of this program, we contribute to the “Charging and Accounting technology for the Internet–CATI” project. The CATI project aims at providing a sound basis for the commerce of network services by Internet Service Provider (ISPs). The services considered are: connections with Quality of Service requirements (security, bandwidth, jitter, etc.); configuration and management services for closed Virtual Private Networks (VPN) where Quality of Service requirements have been specified; accounting and charging services in order to determine resource usage and to allow the integration of different pricing schemes; integrated and online payment system to pay for the usage of the service; reservation-based services like ReSource ReserVation Protocol (Integrated Service-IntServ) for access networks to the Internet and/or aggregated-based services (Diferentiated service-Diffserv) for Internet backbone providers. This paper contains the overall presentation of the CATI project but its goal is to introduce our architectural choices and our propositions in term of accounting and charging. 1. Motivation and context