Offline charging for multimedia blended services using Service Capability Interaction Manager in IMS Network

IP Multimedia Subsystems (IMS) networks facilitate delivery of complex and dynamic blended services which involve chaining of multiple service enablers like presence server, multimedia streaming server, and location server etc. These blended services can be dynamically delivered based on user´s preferences or contextual information. IMS networks can be successful if they are proven to be revenue generating. Thus charging of such dynamic blended services is important and is a real challenge especially when it involves multimedia streaming services. 3GPP suggests that the charging function to be located within the serving network. It is thus logical to presume that SCIM (Service Capability Interaction Manager) should take the responsibility to generate the relevant charging information for blended services. One of the major problems during the delivery of a blended service which involves multimedia streaming server is to monitor and control the actual usage of media by user. This is because SCIM may not be involved in actual media session. Thus key charging information in such services may be inaccurate or lost. In this paper we proposed a novel architecture as well as idea to monitor and control the usage of multimedia in blended services delivered through SCIM and also generate the relevant charging information by providing the CDR (Call Detail Record). A use case with call flow is also presented which has been successfully implemented as well as tested in the IMS Innovation Lab and described in this paper.