A two-phased scheme for allocating shared costs to services in a converged network

Migrating towards a converged network allows some important cost-reductions due to economies of scale and scope. The costs of such a converged network are shared among the different services. A fair allocation of these costs is important when determining the cost per service. This paper introduces a method for allocating the costs of the converged network to the different services in a fair manner, based on a combination of bandwidth and peak usage of the network-resources. The method is described using both theoretical and realistic traffic patterns over the network.