Design and Implementation of a Charging and Accounting Architecture for Secure VPN Services to Mobile Users

In the emerging context of mobile Internet, Secure VPN is becoming a very important service. Provision of this problem is among the subjects of IST project INTERNODE. Besides provision of the necessary technical means, charging and accounting also are key related issues. These issues are the subject of this paper. Only by dealing with them successfully, Secure VPN providers can recover their provision costs, increase their profits, and provide the right incentives to their users, thus leading to an efficient operating mode of their network. In this paper, we first define a charging scheme that is fair for the users and provides them with the incentives to use the resources they really need. We then show how the contributing providers can share the total charge earned by each service instance in a fair way, with each provider earning the portion of charge that corresponds to the consumption of his own resources for the service. This is also a very important issue for the commercial viability of Secure VPN service, given that its provision spans multiple domains. Furthermore, we define an appropriate charging and accounting architecture implementing the specified charging scheme for Secure VPN, and the mechanism for revenue sharing. This architecture is compliant to the relevant standards and can serve as a basis for applying other charging schemes as well.