BSA: a framework for efficient accounting on wide-area networks

As global networks are being used by more and more people, they are becoming increasingly interesting for commercial applications. The success and change in direction of the World-Wide Web is a clear indication for this. However this success met a largely unprepared communications infrastructure. The Internet as an originally non-profit network did neither offer the security, nor the globally available accounting infrastructure by itself. These problems were addressed in the recent past, but in a seemingly ad-hoc manner. Several different accounting schemes sensible for only certain types of commercial transactions have been developed, which either seem to neglect the problems of scalability, or trade security for efficiency. Finally, some proposals aim at achieving near perfect security at the expense of efficiency, thus rendering those systems to be of no practical use. In contrast, this paper presents a suitably configurable scheme for accounting in a general, widely distributed client/server environment. When developing the protocol, special attention has been paid to make this approach work well in the future setting of high-bandwidth, high-latency internets. The developed protocol has been applied to a large-scale distributed application, a WWW-based software development environment.