Rate-based Internet Accounting System Using Application-aware Traffic Measurement
TS Choi, Cheorl‐Ho Kim, Yoon Sh, James Park, HS Chung, Lee Bj, HH Kim · 2003
As the Internet is quickly evolving from best-effort networks to business quality premium networks, billing based on the precise traffic measurement becomes an important issue for Internet Service Providers (ISPs). Billing settlement is necessary not only between ISPs and customers but also between ISPs. Currently, most ISPs use a flat rate charging policy. Besides the degree of difficulty in deriving appropriate charging policies agreeable by a concerned party, there are substantial technical challenges to come up with a good usage-based accounting system. Usage-based accounting depending on IP packet header information only is no longer sufficient due to highly dynamic nature of the development and the use of the Internet applications such as peer-to-peer, streaming and network games whose traffic takes substantial amount. They are using port numbers dynamically and even several applications can use the same port number. Packet fragmentation and asymmetric routing contribute to this difficulty as well. In this paper, we propose a high performance, adaptable, configurable, and scalable applicationaware passive traffic measurement and analysis system which can achieve very accurate usage-based accounting. This system consists of dedicated traffic capturing card(s) to improve its performance, an agent which generates flow and packet records based on application signatures, and a server which classifies applications precisely with our novel classification algorithm and correlates sub-flows of incoming and outgoing directions if necessary. It then analyzes their traffic usages in a detailed subflow level (e.g., HTTP request/reply, HTTP reply/request, FTP control request/reply, FTP data request/reply, KAZZA down sender/receiver flow etc.) within an application.