USER ORIENTED IP ACCOUNTING IN MULTI-USER SYSTEMS Ge Zhang, Bernd Reuther, Paul Mueller Department of Computer Science, University of Kaisers/autern Postfach 3049,67653 Kaisers/autern, Germany Tel: ++496312054520, ++496312052161, ++496312052263, Fax: ++496312053056 gezhang@informatik.uni-kl.de, reuther@informatik.uni-kl.de, pmueller@rhrk.uni-kl.de Abstract: The traditional IP accounting method is IP address oriented, that means one IP address corresponds to one user, but it can not meet the finer granularity accounting requirement in multi-user systems, in which many users share one or more IP address at the same time. In the multi-user systems the user oriented IP accounting can distinguish the producers of the IP traffics, which come from the same IP address. Hence it is a more accurate accounting method than traditional IP address oriented accounting method. In this paper, we present the technology of the user oriented IP accounting, and describe the principle of this method, and the realization considerations. Keywords: IP Accounting, IP Billing, Multi-user System 1. INTRODUCTION With the rapid development of the Internet, more and more services are provided by the Internet, more and more users enjoy these Internet services, and consequently more and more traffic are produced. For example, during the last three years the IP data volume of the University of Kaiserslautern doubled every year. In this situation, it is very important to control and measure the Internet usage. IP traffic accounting provides information about the usage of a network and therefore helps to manage it. The accounting data may be used also for billing. Today billing is commonly used by Internet service providers (ISP). But billing systems might be used even within The original version of this chapter was revised: The copyright line was incorrect. This has been corrected. The Erratum to this chapter is available at DOI: 10.1007/978-0-387-35674-7_66 © IFIP International Federation for Information Processing 2003 G. Goldszmidt et al. (eds.), Integrated Network Management VIII