Path coupled accounting mechanisms for "all IP networks"

Accounting in Beyond 3G (B3G) networks is especially challenging, because of the rapidly increasing number of new services and tariff models introduced or to be introduced. Services are not provided statically anymore but must be deployed in short time spans to meet the volatile market demands. As the complexity of the services grows the demand for an equally flexible accounting mechanism increases as well. However nowadays' static accounting approaches with dedicated meters for certain metering tasks might scale badly in this envisioned dynamic environment. Innovative services can not be deployed if expensive accounting tasks in terms of metering resources are required and the dedicated systems cannot guarantee to handle the additional load. On-path configuration of the meters can provide for a dynamic metering configuration. The accounting configuration can be performed agnostic of the roles of the accounting entities in the B3G network architecture allowing a more flexible accounting. The distributed nature of on-path accounting allows for fault tolerance and provides load-balancing. Thus existing metering resources are utilized better and this enables the introduction of demanding accounting mechanisms for new services.