Our idea was to design an accounting system with generic data processing as much as possible independent on network infrastructure physical and logical topology changes. The motivation was to avoid accounting system reconfigurations while reconfiguring network hardware components or changing NREN architecture. This effort resulted in solution based on IP address space distribution and its binding to NREN border points and NREN customers. As was mentioned above the system provides generic data processing, which means in this case, that statistics are not computed on demand, but all results for all known IP address ranges are computed per each atomic time step. In other words this means, that the functionality of the system relies on the efficiency of algorithms and data model used as well as the database engine speed to compute all requested statistics within base pooling interval.
Authorization is hierarchical following the user and connected organization relationship.
Measurement and self configuration are network node based and running in never ending loops according to parameters set up by system administrator. Personal and global profiles to store frequently requested sets of objects are available. To enable periodical tasks to be run the application can be controlled on background by agent to produce static HTML result pages. Administration interface is delivered by Web server too. It enables to set up the measurement engine parameters as well as the set of measured network devices including separate measurement strategy for each of them.