Impact of differentiated service billing on the quality of service of an IP network

There is an exponential rise in awareness, reliance and usage of the Internet protocol (IP) network. The advent of multimedia applications on the IP network, such as, voice over IP, streaming audio and video, etc, has contributed immensely to the congestion on the broadband network. The increase in the number of users who rely on peer to peer (P2P) protocols to allow transfer of very large files and applications has also added to the congestion experienced by users of the IP network. Quality of service (QoS), bandwidth management or IP service control are all general terms given to a broad range of techniques employed to control and shape traffic on this network. Some works tried to control the IP traffic by introducing billing; however, most billing techniques in literature did not seriously consider the overall QoS of the network. In this work we present a new billing scheme termed differentiated service billing (DSB), which controlled congestion by checking user behavior with respect to type of application used on the network. It thus improves the overall QoS perceived by users of `relevant' applications. The DSB is an improved variant of usage billing. It effectively checks the usage of bandwidth-intensive applications, especially for a campus network. Our results clearly showed an improved network link performance when this billing scheme was compared with the traditional flat billing and usage billing schemes.