The design of a single funding point charging architecture

Abstract

Most federations across the world apply Single Sign-On (SSO) Authentication and Authorization Infrastructure (AAI) platforms. Thus, access to services offered by organizations, which belong to such a federation, can be granted to their users independent of their current location. The increasing demand to charge users for those service usages lead organizations to establish various charging mechanisms. However, until today the majority of organizations is using service-dependent solutions to perform charging. This policy absorbs the utility of an SSO system, since users still have to monitor and control each credit account separately. Therefore, the approach proposed defines an extension to SSO platforms, which is consolidated, non dispersed and service-independent. A Single Funding Point Charging Architecture (SFP-CA) allows users to settle payments using funds from the same credit account, for any type of service they use inside their federation. © 2012 IFIP International Federation for Information Processing.