Re: An opes usage question.

Markus, thanks for your comments. Depending on what is being done 
billing could be done after adaptation but this doesn't solve the 
general case and always makes billing the last stage in the opes proxy 
pipeline. I think this would overly restrict opes configurations and 
probably cause issues elsewhere? Also, this restriction might not be 
practical especially if billing is done in the network where the content 
is located and adaptation is done in another network. In fact, the 
content may not even be delivered  because of policy in the access 
network, e.g. parental controls is one situation that comes to mind.  In 
my particular situation the billing server address for each particular 
flow must be in the opes traces to be used by any downstream proxy and 
if there are multiple proxy addresses present which one would be the 
billing proxy?  I am not sure the tracing functionality will help but I 
will investigate.
Thanks for the discussion
Regards  John



Markus Hofmann wrote:

> John G. Waclawsky wrote:
>
> > Let's assume, for a specific example, a network allows access to 
> > premium content that is billable by the number of bytes being 
> > delivered. The content flows to the users from a premium content 
> > server through a pool of billing gateway proxies and then proceeds to 
> > the next stage where the content may be modified by other proxies for 
> > rendering on a user's device (color to black/white, compressed for 
> > efficiency, adding advertisements or banners etc.). If any particular 
> > flow adaptation reduces the number of bytes then billing needs to be 
> > adjusted.
>
> My first question about this specific example would be why the billing 
> is done before the adaptation. If the user is billed for the adapted 
> content, do the billing after the adaptation and there's no need for 
> the kind of "callout server interaction" you're talking about, right?
> Anyway, I believe the problem you're interested in boils down to 
> tracing callout servers that did some earlier operations on the 
> message. In your hypothetic example above, the adaptation server would 
> have to be able to identify (the IP address?) of the billing server, 
> so that it can contact the billing server, right? Could the OPES 
> tracing functionality be of any help?
> -Markus