Design and Implementation of DSL-Based Access Solutions

Accounting and Billing

Early in the Internet access age when most people accessed the Internet through dialup modems, service providers charged by either the connection time or the amount of traffic sent and received. Most of the service providers use either TACACS+ or RADIUS for both authentication and accounting. RADIUS and TACACS+ keep records of the time users connect, the time they disconnect, and the number of bytes received and transmitted in a flat ASCII file. A simple program is written to convert these records into the format that billing applications can understand. For larger networks where ASCII files do not scale, applications, such as Cisco Secure, which employs the use of a database to keep track of these connection times, are ...