Billing system for Internet service provider (ISP)

The main objective of this paper is to propose and develop a billing system for use by Internet service providers (ISPs) to charge Internet users according to their network usage (i.e. their traffic). This means that users are charged depending on the volume of traffic they create. The main idea of the proposed billing system is that when a user attempts to establish a connection with the outside world, the connection establishment is postponed while the user is authenticated and it is verified that he is ready to pay for this connection. Generally, if the user is ready to pay, the connection is established and his traffic (which reflects his usage) is metered. An invoice is generated according to the metered traffic. The proposed billing system consists of two main components, the meter module and invoice generation module. We measure several key statistics, such as connection setup time, active connection count, response time and complexity of searching the connection tables, without the billing system and with it to determine whether or not it is feasible to implement the proposed billing system. The system can be used to allocate an ISP´s network resources fairly and efficiently. It can also be used to overcome network congestion problems.