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 MNO´s 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.