Ralph Kühne

Charging and Billing in Modern Communications Networks — A Comprehensive Survey of the State of the Art and Future Requirements

In mobile telecommunication networks the trend for an increasing heterogeneity of access networks, the convergence with fixed networks as well as with the Internet are apparent. The resulting future converged network with an expected wide variety of services and a possibly stiff competition between the different market participants as well as legal issues will bring about requirements for charging systems that demand for more flexibility, scalability and efficiency than is available in todays systems. This article surveys recent developments in charging and billing architectures comprising both standardisation work as well as research projects. The second main contribution of this article is a comparison of key features of these developments thus giving a list of essential charging and billing ingredients for tomorrows communication and service environments.

Compensation: Architecture for supporting dynamicity and negotiation in accounting, charging and billing

As of today, contractual agreements govern the terms of interaction between users and providers as well as between interoperating providers. Such contracts indicate usable services and resources, tariffs, payment methods, etc. Typically, these terms are negotiated once before the contract is signed and are seldom changed thereafter, such that contracts are rather static and inflexible. Furthermore, establishing such a contract requires human involvement. As a consequence, it is difficult for small content or access providers to reach users and to find interoperation partners amongst the large operators. In addition, providers in general lack flexibility with respect to charging according to demand, and users are unable to easily change their preferred access and service conditions depending on their current life situation and location. Supporting automated and dynamic negotiation of contractual agreements as well as implementing these agreements in an automated, ad hoc fashion are therefore key requirements for compensation systems in future mobile networks. In this paper we propose a functional compensation architecture that meets these key requirements. The architecture is furthermore designed to be able to operate atop of current compensation systems and thus protects and even leverages prior investments. Finally, the architecture allows for the integration of different legacy and non-legacy compensation-related components and thus supports heterogeneous systems. The description of the conceptual architecture in this work is complemented by presenting a prototype including first performance indicators.

A Mechanism for Charging System Self-Configuration in Next Generation Mobile Networks

Self-management is an emerging idea in charging system research taken over from autonomic computing to address the complexity problem of system deployment, maintenance and administration and to improve the performance and flexibility of the charging system what will as a whole eventually decrease its total cost of ownership. In this paper, we describe a mechanism for charging system self-configuration when new network or service elements that record charging information are added as well as for charging system self-optimisation during every-day operation.

Compensation - Dynamic Charging and Billing Relationships in Next-Generation Business Environments

Networks are becoming more dynamic, not only as a result of mobility, but also due to service requirements, business aspects, and other reasons. This dynamicity will also reflect on charging and billing, requiring a fresh look at charging and billing from both the business side and the technical side. This paper presents the concepts and mechanisms for dynamic charging and billing in ambient networks, and in general for next-generation business environments.