The Evaluation of the Efficient Prepaid Scheme TICA for All-IP Networks and Internet Services

Future all-IP networks will support a variety of high-value IP-based services including the upcoming integration of today´s non-IP services offered by mobile telecommunication providers. Besides postpaid charging, prepaid charging will play an important role in all-IP environments due to the financial control of providers and customers, thus determining effective economic management means for Internet services. Since existing prepaid charging solutions do not meet imposed all-IP requirements, a novel approach-TICA (time interval calculation algorithm)-with three variants has been presented recently in [14,16]. To prove its optimized performance for many service mixes foreseen, this paper performs a thorough evaluation based on different scenarios. Additionally, comparing TICA´s overall performance with existing online charging solutions shows TICA´s promising results in terms of way smaller quantity of credit checks required and smaller financial risks for providers to be achieved. Finally, the three TICA variants reveal a clear sensitivity to defined input parameters. These findings indicate that a numbers of suitable settings can be used by service providers.