6. DATA SOURCES › 6.6 Basic Network Accounting › 6.6.2 Identification of Sessions for Differential Billing

6.6.2 Identification of Sessions for Differential Billing

A standard requirement for resource billing is differential
charging based on service or configuration.

The user with a locally-attached terminal may be charged a
premium versus the user with a remotely-attached device since
the locally-attached terminal provides faster response time.
Or, based on the additional cost of the facilities for a
remotely-attached user, the differential may be applied in
exactly the opposite way.

To accommodate this requirement, logical unit-to-logical unit
(LU-LU) sessions are distinguished as local, remote, or
application-to-application (APPL-APPL) by the CA MICS Network
Analyzer Option. Other session types (for example, system
services control point to system services control point (SSCP
to SSCP)) are designated as "other."  Users of the CA MICS
Accounting and Chargeback Option may, through a special
feature called XMITTYPE, set different rates for each
billable element depending upon whether the session is local,
remote, or APPL-APPL.  For example, the cost for
locally-attached devices could be set at $.04 per thousand
characters, while the cost for remotely-attached devices
could be set at $.02 per thousand characters.

The method used by the CA MICS Network Analyzer Option to
distinguish local, remote, and APPL-APPL sessions is
described in Section 6.7.  If you choose this billing
approach, be sure to read this section before you finish
installing the CA MICS Network Analyzer Option.

In addition to this facility, CA MICS Network Analyzer Option
provides for differential billing based on other service and
configuration considerations.  For example, this capability
could be useful for an enterprise that assigns a surcharge to
network traffic that receives a higher priority, and
therefore faster service.  One way to assign different
priorities to different types of work in an SNA network is to
use transmission priorities.  Transmission priorities may be
assigned to different classes of work so that, for example,
interactive traffic receives a higher priority than batch
traffic.  Transmission priority values of 0, 1, and 2 can be
assigned, with 2 representing the highest priority.

In the example where "interactive" and "batch" are assigned
different priorities, the data center may assign
"interactive" the highest priority of 2, and "batch" the
lowest priority of 0.  The enterprise may want to apply a
factor to charges for interactive traffic that result in
their cost per thousand characters being 1.5 times the
standard cost, which is applied to batch traffic.  The way to
implement such a billing strategy using the CA MICS Network
Analyzer Option is through the Network Service Group
facility, described in the following sections.

   1 - Network Service Group Definitions (NETGROUP)
   2 - NETGROUP Classification Examples