Domain Based Metering

In the last two years, there is a gaining interest in usage based accounting for the Internet. One of the driving forces for this growing interest is the progress being made in providing some form of quality assurance in IP packet forwarding. One of the key processes in an accounting system is metering, gathering of network usage parameters on which the accounting is or can be based. In this paper are addressed issues that are potentially of interest in Internet accounting. One of these issues is the possibility to base accounting on traffic or flows that crosses the borders of a domain to different neighboring domains; that is, is it possible to meter these different flows? In this paper, the backgrounds and rationales of this, so-called, domain based metering are discussed and two preliminary experiments are reported.