Abstract

Web services are increasingly being deployed for commercial business applications. An important management component is the Accounting Framework that handles the metering and accounting of service usage. Metering is the function that collects the information regarding the resource usage of a certain service by the consumers. Users can then be charged and billed as per their usage of the service. Traditional rating systems meter the usage of physical resources such as CPU, disk space or network usage such as bandwidth. In web services, unlike the traditional environment, users do not directly consume these physical resources, but instead remotely and indirectly use the service provider resources. This study proposes a metering framework for web services to measure the service usage and record the information using the standard Internet Protocol Detail Record format. The proposed framework has been implemented and tested by extending the RADIUS protocol to measure and record web service usage. The metering framework has been tested using a sample web application with multiple web services.

Keywords:

IPDR format, usage data record, web service accounting, web service metering,

References

1. Albaugh, V. and H. Madduri, 2004. The utility metering service of the universal management infrastructure. IBM Syst. J., 43(1): 179-189.
   CrossRef    
2. Albreshne, A., P. Fuhrer and J. Pasquier, 2009. Web Services Technologies: State of the Art. Retrieved form: diuf.unifr.ch/drupal/softeng/sites/diuf. unifr.ch.drupal.../WP09-04.pdf?.
   
3. Andrew, S.K., 2009. IPDR Deployment Guide. Version 0.1 (Draft).
   
4. Bella, M.A.B., J.H.P. Eloff and M.S. Olivier, 2005. Using the internet protocol detail record standard for next-generation network billing and fraud detection. Pretoria, South Africa.
   
5. Bernd, P. and S. Ruben, 2002. Metering and Logging of Internet Service Consumptions. Internet Economics.
   Direct Link
6. Cotton, S., 2002. Network Data Management-Usage (NDM-U) for IP-based Services. IPDR, Version 3.1.
   
7. Kumar, A., V. Agarwal and N. Karnik, 2008. Metering and accounting for service-oriented computing? E-Bus. Model. Serv. Commun., pp: 275.
   
8. Muthu Lakshmi, V. and S. Anand, 2012a. Policy Based Accounting for Web Services. In: Meghanathan, N. (Ed.), CCSIT 2012. Part III, LNICST, 86: 68-75.
   
9. Muthu Lakshmi, V. and S. Anand, 2012b. A generic charging policy based accounting for web services. J. Comput. Sci., 8(9): 1455-1466.
   CrossRef    
10. Papazoglou, M.P. and J. Yang, 2002. Design methodology for web services and business processes. Proceeding of the 3rd International Workshop on Technologies for E-Services. Lecture Notes on Computer Science, Springer-Verlag, Berlin, pp: 54-64.
    CrossRef    
11. Rigney, C., S.W. Livingston, A.R. Merit and W.S. Daydreamer, 2000. Remote Authentication Dial In User Service (RADIUS). IETF RFC 2865.
    Direct Link
12. Ruiz-Agundez, I., K. Yoseba, P. Penya and G. Bringas, 2010. Taxonomy of the future internet accounting process. Proceeding of the 4th International Conference on Advanced Engineering Computing and Applications in Sciences, pp: 111-117.
    
13. Serra da Cruz, S.M., L.M. Campos, M.L.M. Campos and P.F. Pires, 2003. A data mart approach for monitoring web services usage and evaluating quality of service. Proceedings of the 18th Brazilian symposium on databases (SBBD, 2003). Manaus, Brazil, pp: 267-280.
    
14. Stamatis, K., P.G. da Silva and D. Ilic, 2011. Performance Evaluation of a Web Service Enabled Smart Metering Platform. In: Hatziargyriou et al. (Ed.): E-Energy 2010. LNICST 54, Institute for Computer Sciences, Social Informatics and Telecommunications Engineering, pp: 54-63.
    
15. Van Le, M., B.J.F. van Beijnum and G.B. Huitema, 2004. A service component-based accounting and charging architecture to support interim mechanisms across multiple domains. Proceeding of IEEE/IFIP Network Operations and Management Symposium (NOMS, 2004), 1: 555-568.
    CrossRef    
16. Zhang, G., J. Muller and P. Muller, 2005. Designing web service accounting system. Proceeding of the Workshop on Web Services: Business, Financial and Legal Aspects, DOI: 10.1.1.92.9067.
    

Competing interests

The authors have no competing interests.

Open Access Policy

This article is distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/), which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided you give appropriate credit to the original author(s) and the source, provide a link to the Creative Commons license, and indicate if changes were made.

Copyright

The authors have no competing interests.