Automating the Generation, Deployment and Application of Charging Schemes for Composed IMS Services

Providers of communications services aim to specify, realise and deploy services as quickly as possible in order to gain a competitive edge in meeting evolving consumer demands. One means of creating new service offerings is the composition of pre-existing services which, when orchestrated in a particular manner, provide novel functionality. Indeed, many industry analysts predict the emergence of virtual services providers, who do not themselves deploy and offer individual services, but instead orchestrate services offered by other providers. Crucial to the success of providers offering composed services is an efficient, automated process by which such services are charged and billed for. In this paper we present a process for automated generation of charging schemes for composed IMS services, based on analysis of the charging schemes associated with services comprising those composed services. Charging schemes are specified using a Domain Specific Language (DSL), so that they can then be mapped to platform specific representations that can be deployed onto one or more rating engines. Semi- automated configuration of charging schemes in this manner obviates the need for expensive manual configuration of accounting components every time a new composed services is specified and activated.