RFC 2975 (rfc2975) - Page 2 of 54

Introduction to Accounting Management

RFC 2975         Introduction to Accounting Management      October 2000


Table of Contents

   1.  Introduction                                             2
       1.1   Requirements language                              3
       1.2   Terminology                                        3
       1.3   Accounting management architecture                 5
       1.4   Accounting management objectives                   7
       1.5   Intra-domain and inter-domain accounting          10
       1.6   Accounting record production                      11
       1.7   Requirements summary                              13
   2.  Scaling and reliability                                 14
       2.1   Fault resilience                                  14
       2.2   Resource consumption                              23
       2.3   Data collection models                            26
   3.  Review of Accounting Protocols                          32
       3.1 RADIUS                                              32
       3.2 TACACS+                                             33
       3.3 SNMP                                                33
   4.  Review of Accounting Data Transfer                      43
       4.1 SMTP                                                44
       4.2 Other protocols                                     44
   5.  Summary                                                 45
   6. Security Considerations                                  48
   7. Acknowledgments                                          48
   8. References                                               48
   9. Authors' Addresses                                       52
   10. Intellectual Property Statement                         53
   11. Full Copyright Statement                                54

1.  Introduction

   The field of Accounting Management is concerned with the collection
   of resource consumption data for the purposes of capacity and trend
   analysis, cost allocation, auditing, and billing.  This document
   describes each of these problems, and discusses the issues involved
   in design of modern accounting systems.

   Since accounting applications do not have uniform security and
   reliability requirements, it is not possible to devise a single
   accounting protocol and set of security services that will meet all
   needs.  Thus the goal of accounting management is to provide a set of
   tools that can be used to meet the requirements of each application.
   This document describes the currently available tools as well as the
   state of the art in accounting protocol design.  A companion
   document, RFC 2924, reviews the state of the art in accounting
   attributes and record formats.





Aboba, et al.                Informational