NIPON:Nutzerbasiertes IP accounting

Description

With the rapid growth of tele- and data communication as well as the increasing commercial use of the Internet, the accounting of service in integrated networks becomes more and more significant. The number of available services is rising as well as the usage of the existing services (mainly HTTP based) is increasing.

Traditional IP accounting is IP address based, that means, one IP address is associated with one user. In case of multi-user systems, where serveral users can share one IP address at the same time, traffic can not be associated with the traffic originator. To solve this problem, we suggest the user based IP accounting technique.

Goal

The goal of the NIPON project is, distinguishing the originators of the IP traffic instead of the differentiation of endsystems which is common today. With regard to the exponential growth of the bandwidth requirement and the QoS ability of the network, this technique provides the possibility to billing the network service on the real users.

In the NIOPN project we have studied and compared several IP accounting techniques and products. A concept has been developed that enables the extension of current IP accounting systems to a user based accounting system with the utilization of agents residing in endsystems. Figure 1 illustrates the user based IP accounting system architecture.

According to the agent method, we have implemented a prototype in Windows 2000 terminal server and Solaris respectively. The agent driver interface is compatible with the IP accouning architecture suggested by the IETF.

Investors

The NIPON project is sponsored by Bundesministeriums für Bildung und Forschung, within the development program "Gigabit Technologie" of Deutschen Forschungsnetzes.

Contact

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