BILLING USERS AND PRICING FOR TCP

This paper presents a system for billing users for their TCP traffic. This is achieved by postponing the establishment of connections while the user is contacted, verifying in a secure way that they are prepare d to pay, By presenting the user with cost and price information, the system can be used for cost recovery and to encourage efficient use of network resources. The system requires no changes to existing protoco ls or applications and can be used to recover costs between cooperatin g sites. Statistics collected from a four-day trace of traffic between the University of California, Berkeley, and the rest of the Internet demonstrate that such a billing system is practical and introduces acc eptable latency, An implementation based on the BayBridge prototype ro uter is described. Our study also indicates that pricing schemes may b e used to control network congestion either by rescheduling time-insen sitive traffic to a less expensive time of the day, or by smoothing pa cket transfers to reduce traffic peaks.