Link Weighting: An Important Basis for Charging in the Internet

Current charging mechanisms in the Internet are restricted mainly to volumeand time of the day. We propose a mechanism which allows to use additionalinformation for charging in the edges and core of the network. Links or networkclouds will have weights which are dynamic, e.g. based on congestion level. Thismechanism covers the current Internet protocol, IPv4, and the future one, IPv6,and in both cases, unicast and multicast. We also provide discussion on howcharging using these weights...