A Service Model and Architecture in Support of IP Service Accounting

Accounting of service usage is one of the main tasks of service providers in their operation and management processes, providing the necessary information for the subsequent charging process. Because of the increasing number and diversity of services in IP-based networks, accounting has to provide flexible and extensible means supporting different service specific accounting attributes in order to meet the providers´ requirements. Furthermore, users typically access services of different providers, resulting in a service composition in a multi-provider environment. After identifying key players in this scenario, this paper presents a service model, classifying different service types, and proposes an architecture (SMArch) for a common accounting scheme, which is implemented based on the IPDR framework and reference code