MBA: a tool for multicast billing and accounting

IP multicast deployment has been slow due to several factors. One of the important reasons is a lack of support for debugging, accounting and billing services for multicast protocols. We propose a common framework that can be used to provide multiple multicast services efficiently. The framework collects information such as multicast router status, flow statistics and stores them in a database. The data could be used for debugging, traffic engineering, accounting and billing. We illustrate the use of the framework for accounting and billing. We describe a prototype implementation of our approach. Our contributions include a protocol independent tree discovery mechanism and an efficient algorithm for per-receiver accounting.