Accounting and pricing: A forecast of the scenario of the next generation internet

The Internet is becoming a multi-service network. This transformation makes it necessary to differentiate both network services and tariffs, according to the types of applications and customers' willingness to pay. Significant changes to existing architectures, procedures and protocols are necessary in order to turn the Internet into a multi-service network and a platform to develop business solutions efficiently. This evolution will favor the realization and deployment of advanced architectures to support routing, Quality of Service (QoS) provisioning, pricing, billing, accounting, and security functions. The flat-rate pricing model, commonly applied by Internet Service Providers, may become inadequate when added value IP services have to be charged. Hence, the need to define new pricing criteria, based on an appropriate combination of current usage of network resources and on the amount of the reserved resources, is expected. Other issues specifically related to these aspects are QoS-and-price based inter-domain routing, transport and content accounting models and architectures. The paper aims at introducing these problems, by describing and evaluating the solutions proposed in literature from the point of view of scalability and flexibility of market offers, and by identifying possible short-medium term trends in the field.