“Smarter” online charging for over-the-top services by introducing user context

Exposing the fundamental network capabilities on behalf of the mobile network operator may offer innovative way for the service providers to provide more user-oriented services. The network capability we focus on is online charging, and in particular the lack of functional relationship between the online charging and the service delivery processes (other than the obvious one, reducing the available credit). With the goal to make better use of the knowledge about the users which is available to the operator, we identify and examine the user-related information that can be found at various functions in the mobile network as a whole. Current 3GPP specifications enable the online charging system to retrieve some of this information but this potential has not yet been used to the fullest, for example, when considering multiple concurrent services and service adaptation. We propose a model of managing and using the user charging context, based on “smarter” use of information available to the operator. We illustrate the proposed approach by a use case involving an adaptive multimedia service the behavior of which is influenced in a positive way by user context based online charging.