Management of differentiated services usage by the Cumulus pricing scheme and a generic Internet charging system

Since the Internet is on the move to provide differentiated services, for the backbone based on the differentiated services architecture (DiffServ), suitable management mechanisms are required. Scalable solutions for overload management are a must, such as economically-driven functions of charging and pricing. Future commercial networks need to offer as well a new view of pricing, considered as management information. Therefore, the Cumulus pricing scheme (CPS) explicitly proposed here for the DiffServ technology is the only approach known so far, which defines a clear relation between different time scales of measurement, accounting, and charging periods. The scheme is flexible enough to allow network management according to actual forces of the market. CPS´s implementation is supported by a designed generic Internet charging system offering a service-independent architecture and integrating interchangeably economically-controlled network management functions of charge calculation and pricing. In particular, it has been applied to DiffServ and the new CPS