Accounting mechanism for membership size-dependent pricing of multicast traffic

Abstract

A number of schemes for membership size-dependent pricing of multicast traffic have been proposed recently. The enabling accounting technology, however, is lagging behind. Retaining an exact count of the active receivers is very difficult. To target an accounting mechanism, we suggest novel monitoring algorithms that combine a hierarchical control structure with event-driven monitoring. The efficiency and tradeoffs of the proposed solutions are thoroughly studied through simulations using both synthetic, and real MBone workloads. As we show, depending on the workload and the required accuracy, we can reduce the monitoring traffic by factor of 2 to 10 compared to other known alternatives. © Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg 2003.