Telecom operations have changed considerably in the recent years. Apart from developing networking capabilities, telcos are trying their hardest to upgrade their telecom billing and service monetization capabilities. New innovations like convergent billing by employing an Online Charging System (OCS) has worked like a charm. However, there is still room to grow in this field as a storm of new technologies is beckoning.

Addressing the Requirements Posed by Composite Services

One of the problems that is still unaddressed by the modern-day online charging system is that of billing composite services. There are many scenarios where telcos can't charge customers properly, which is why; some services are not delivered at all, while some cannot be delivered appropriately. To explain this let's take an example where a customer is using a video calling service that streams both video and audio at the same time. Now suddenly, if due to some network issue the video stops streaming and the call becomes a voice call, then there is no provision in the OCS to terminate the session-based charging for video services in real-time. Hence, the subscriber ends up paying more than what he should have paid if OCS has terminated the session-based charging for video services at that point.

Similarly, if a customer is paying for a 4K quality video as an OTT service from his CSP (Communication Services Provider) and the internet speed goes down and the video turns into a standard HD video (to accommodate for bandwidth loss), an OCS won't be able to apply the lower rate for an HD video in real-time.

Given the rise of breakthrough technologies like IoT and 5G, there is a possibility that many such use cases will arise and afflict both subscribers and telcos alike, unless a solution for charging composite services is devised.

Design Proposals to Meet the Need of Composite Service Charging

The current OCS specified by 3GPP does not support online charging for composite services. A proposed design, which may solve this issue once and for all, includes SID and NGOSS (New Generation Operations Systems and Software) concepts. It features functional charging components along with their interactions at different stages. This proposal is based on the assumption that composite services will be communicated across a slew of admin domains and many delivery platforms. Therefore, a merger of different web services and IMS (IP-Multimedia Subsystem) services, which are based on SOA (Service Oriented Architecture), needs to be employed.

To manage the complexity of such a convoluted charging system, a paradigm of service broker is proposed. As more than one and different types of brokers will be required for communicating composite services, two types of brokers are advocated:

• Inter-domain service broker which resides in the web-services domain
• IMS Service Broker that is in the IMS domain

In this proposal, the inter-domain service broker is the leading one as it is tasked with imparting end-to-end services to the users. Composite services are communicated to different admin domains via a service provider domain that is backed by core IMS infrastructure, and a third party domain that is not always supported by the IMS. The support for third party domain comes from some other network infrastructure.

This model has a lot of other attributes and amendments to pre-existing OCS architecture (which you can read about here). More investigation is required in the future to propose a viable composite services-charging OCS architecture to 3GPP. However, it is almost certain that this new model will require more computing horsepower than ever. Therefore, new computing tech like in-memory processing along with relevant database management techniques is required in the future. Hence, it makes good business sense to partner with a telecom billing vendor that is completely scalable and will not shy away from upgrading its convergent billing architecture and online charging system, if the situation demands it.

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