Exploring context based charging for composite services

Rich and attractive mobile services have been developed as result of technological advances and emergent mobile business models. Product launching has been improved through packaging and orchestration of services components using service composition techniques. The design of charging systems, which can explore partner information, is a strong enabler for mobile composite services ecosystems. The authors present the use of inter-domain contextual information contained in composite services chains as a new input to charging. They propose a mechanism to support inter-domain contextual information dissemination towards charging systems. The solution is based on diameter extensions and is in conformance to standard charging models.