Bill-Pay Control: An Interactive User Interface to Select IP Service Quality

The future Internet may be built to deliver better service to traffic that is accompanied by additional payments. In such a scenario, changes in payments and the resulting performance impact could be realized on very fine timescales, such as with in seconds. Thus, users would benefit from (1) a desktop instrument that measures and prese nts their applications' Internet traffic in a user-friendly fashion and (2) desktop controls t hat allow the adjustment of desired service level, and corresponding payment, for their application traffic in real time. In this paper we present Bill-Pay Control, an interactive, web-based user interface that we designed and implemented as part of Bill-Pay Sim, a simulation system that emulates the performance that such a future Internet might exhibit. Bill -Pay Control runs on a user's work- station, continually displays application-level network traffic statistics, and allows the user to select accompanying service levels. This functionality provides the user with the flexibility to improve network and application performance by controlling payments tied to the chosen traffic. We also report our initial experience with the syste m and make observations about its efficacy as an evaluation environment for proposed Internet billing schemes.