Integrated network traffic measurement and billing system

In a typical campus network different tools can be deployed to gather network statistics, but tools to gather user statistics are comparatively less common. The difficulty arises because each user may log in from different machines and from different access networks, and hence it is hard to keep track of user login profiles. This problem is further complicated if users are given dynamically allocated IPs for each login session. In this paper, we describe the implementation of a traffic measurement and billing system for our university campus network. In this system we keep track of user logins, and with information gathered from monitoring the packets in the network, we estimate the amount of bandwidth consumed by each user to access resources within the campus network and also to access resources in external networks, so as to facilitate further developments like usage billing.