On the Feasibility of Bilaterally Agreed Accounting of Resource Consumption

The services offered by Internet Data Centers involve the provision of storage, bandwidth and computational resources. A common business model is to charge consumers on a pay-per-use basis where they periodically pay for the resources they have consumed (as opposed to a fixed charge for service provision). The pay-per-use model raises the question of how to measure resource consumption. Currently, a widely used accounting mechanism is provider-side accounting where the provider unilaterally measures the consumer’s resource consumption and presents the latter with a bill. A serious limitation of this approach is that it does not offer the consumer sufficient means of performing reasonableness checks to verify that the provider is not accidentally or maliciously overcharging. To address the problem the paper develops bilateral accounting models where both consumer and provider independently measure resource consumption, verify the equity of the accounting process and try to resolve potential conflicts emerging from the independently produced results. The paper discusses the technical issues involved in bilateral accounting.