To appear in 15th International Teletraffic Congress, June 1997
In a multiservice network the bandwidth and quality of service requirements of different connections can impose greatly differing loads on the network. Usage-sensitive charging aims to ensure that connection charges properly reflect this load, and hence that the network operator's revenue matches the investment required to provide capacity to carry the traffic, and customers have an incentive to prioritise their traffic appropriately. Competition should ensure the charges for different services reflect the costs of providing those services. In this paper we focus on the issues of user/network interaction that are inherent in appropriate usage-sensitive charging schemes.
An earlier version appeared in the IEE Colloquium on Charging for ATM (1996).