Research And Design About The Content-based Billing System

The ISPs (Internet Service Providers) and ICPs (Internet Content Providers) are both faced with a revenue issue. For ISPs, there had been a treamendous increase of users, but the growth speed and broadband usage were far from their expectation. As to the ICPs, they have no other way of making income but advertisements, which causes the lack of motivity to develop more inviting applications for users. For optimizing the situation, a well-circulating broadband value chain is wanted and in the chain, content charging of ICP is a very important node.In Internet, users' identifications are hard to be reached, and it is almost impossible to get the vivit content by analyzing the packet transmitting between networks, all of which maked content charging a tough problem. In the content-based billing system that presented in the paper, the content charging was complished by ISP and ICPs through their cooperation. ICPs performed content charging and ISP fulfilled the task of billing and charging for ICPs, thus they could share the profit from the system. The architecture of the content-billing system was designed, and the functions and their interaction procedures between main modules in the system were described.The paper emphasized at two main problems in the conten-based billing system: user authentication and content charging. First, it extended the present authentication and accounting system, and brought forword a so-called "one-point authentication" method by referring to the SSO (Single Sign On) technology. Second, it put forword a way of content charging realization that initiated by ICPs. At last, it defined some private communication protocols that were used in the content-based billing system.