Stephan Flake

Convergent Online Charging for Context-Aware Mobile Services

Personalized and context-aware services are of high interest for mobile network operators (MNOs) to keep existing and win new subscribers. Although such services are already available, they are frequently offered by third parties in a rather stand-alone manner. The challenge is to come up with appropriate interfaces that allow (a) third parties to offer their innovative services via an MNO s network infrastructure and (b) to charge corresponding service users through the MNOs existing Charging and Billing System in a robust and reliable way. This article presents convergent online rating, charging and billing mechanisms for context-aware mobile services offered by third party service providers, e.g., local mobile services. The proposed mechanisms build upon international standards like IP Multimedia Subsystem (IMS) and Parlay X and are imple mented as Web Services, such that they are fully applicable in SOA-based environments.

Third-Party-Initiated Context-Aware Real-Time Charging and Billing on an Open SOA Platform

This article presents our prototypical implementation of enabling services for context-aware real-time charging and billing based on the international Parlay X standard. The work is part of an open SOA platform allowing easy third-party composition of context- aware mobile services. The article illustrates why and how the standardized Parlay X Web Service interfaces had to be extended to cope with the demands of the considered open SOA platform.

Towards a Platform for User-Generated Mobile Services

In the near future, the trend of user-generated content and services currently observable in the Internet domain will also affect the mobile environment: mobile users will become able to easily create content and small services while on the move and offer them to social communities. Mobile users will no longer be pure consumers, they will also become producers and providers of mobile content and services. However, to let this vision come true, a new mobile service platform has to be built and established. In this article we are surveying relevant aspects, like service technologies, semantic search and recommendation mechanisms, revenue sharing, and security technologies. Based on that survey, requirements and challenges are identified. By means of an application scenario from the health and fitness domain, we present a first concept for a platform that allows for building virtual communities with easy and inherent support for real physical meetings.

Mobile Digital Rights Management: Security Requirements and Copy Detection Mechanisms

This paper addresses the specification of security modules in a mobile digital rights management (DRM) approach with a focus on copy detection mechanisms. The presented DRM approach aims at enhancing the latest DRM standard of the Open Mobile Alliance (OMA). In particular, we present a completed DRM infrastructure, introduce additional entities for billing purposes, and apply techniques to hamper unauthorised decryption and to protect the copyright of the digital distributed content by means of watermarking and digital fingerprinting techniques

Towards a Policy and Charging Control Architecture for Online Charging

Consistent and flexible policy and charging control is one key factor for effective access control and efficient resource management in IP-based multimedia communication networks. One approach to deal with this challenge is to put more decision logic into the so-called mediation layer which is residing between the operators’ core network and the charging system. This article describes our research study to extend the mediation layer with more capabilities for online charging control. The presented prototype implements and extends parts of the 3GPP Policy and Charging Control Architecture using the open source JAIN SLEE framework Mobicents.

Real-time billing as a service — A standard-based proof-of-concept implementation

This article presents a proof-of-concept implementation of a managed service for real-time rating, charging, and billing. The formal model of the usage tariffs and the operational interface utilized for this service are based on open standards. An end-to-end use case from the domain of medical image processing is outlined to illustrate the ease of integration of rating and charging into existing IT services.

Service Design Studio for SaaS

The aim of the Service Design Studio project is to provide methods and tools to enable the deployment of existing software in cloud environments based on the Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) model. As the project focuses on logistics IT services, the approach is contributing to a new ‘Logistics-as-a-Service’ offering. This article provides a description of the requirements analysis for enabling logistics IT services to be offered in cloud environments, the concepts for the necessary methods and tools, and the implementation of a proof of concept Service Design Studio environment.