Towards a Swiss National Research Infrastructure

In this position paper we describe the current status and plans for a Swiss National Research Infrastructure. Swiss academic and research institutions are very autonomous. While being loosely coupled, they do not rely on any centralized management entities. Therefore, a coordinated national research infrastructure can only be established by federating the various resources available locally at the individual institutions. The Swiss Multi-Science Computing Grid and the Swiss Academic Compute Cloud projects serve already a large number of diverse user communities. These projects also allow us to test the operational setup of such a heterogeneous federated infrastructure

The Cumulus Pricing Scheme and its Integration into a Generic and Modular Internet Charging System for Differentiated Services

Pricing and charging are the most important management functionalities future commercial networks need to offer. Since the Internet is on the move to provide differentiated services, for the backbone based on the Differentiated Services Architecture (DiffServ), suitable and scalable management mechanisms are required. Based on a new view of pricing, considered as important management information, on one hand, the Cumulus Pricing Scheme (CPS) proposed targets particularly at DiffServ technology and it is the only approach known so far defining a clear relation between different time-scales of accounting periods, measurement periods, and charging periods. Prices in this scheme are based on flat fees and hence predictable and transparent. On the other hand the scheme is flexible enough to allow network managemen

Charging for Differentiated Internet Services

Internet communications today play a major role in data transport within the local as well as the wide area. On one hand, since emerging networked applications require a variety of different communication services, the number of service classes offered by service providers has to be targeted at this demand. On the other hand, assuming that a set of different traffic classes are offered by service providers, the "right" incentives have to be provided, ensuring that applications or their users select the most appropriate traffic class. Even though users are considered to be selective, they intent to chose that class which offers the best available Quality-of-Service (QoS), as long as the price to be paid does not exceed their willingness-to-pay. Therefore, charging for differentiated Internet services is important in a commercialized Internet. The current Internet does not cater for charging at all, since the technology required, the pricing models going beyond a flat-fee approach, and the appropriate efficiency in technical as well as economic terms are still missing on a global basis. This paper outlines the major problems for charging Internet services and presents an important new solution for a pricing approach, which solves the Internet pricing feasibility problem. Based on these preconditions an Internet Charging System (ICS) is described, focusing mainly on its leading characteristics and its particular instantiation for a given scenario