An extensibility of THEMIS billing system for the cloud computing environment

Abstract

With the advent and acceptance of cloud computing the ability to record and account for the usage of cloud resources in a convincing and capricious way has become critical for cloud service providers and users alike. The billing process involves receiving billing records from various networks, determining the billing rates associated with the billing records, calculate the cost for each billing record, aggregating this records periodically to generate invoices, sending invoices to the customer, and collecting payments received from the customer. Traditional billing systems are not enough in terms of security capabilities or computational overhead. In this paper, we propose a secure and no obstructive billing system called THEMIS as a remedy for these limitations. The system uses a novel concept of a cloud notary authority for the supervision of billing. Moreover, to provide a falsification-resistive SLA monitoring mechanism, we devised a SLA monitoring module enhanced with a trusted platform module (TPM), called S-Mon. From the perspective of extensibility, THEMIS is moreover applicable to various target services as well to improve the accountability of each service by applying more monitoring techniques to S-Mon. The overall latency of these systems is shorter and the throughput much higher than the Public key Infrastructure.