OSS functions for flexible charging and billing of mobile services in a federated environment

The 3G environment is promising a wide range of services with a variety of pricing structures and billing schemes for use over different network operator domains, i.e., a federated environment. A key success factor is to respond to customers´ desires to choose the billing scheme that suits their needs, to subscribe to all services as a service package, and to pay for them via a single bill regardless of service type, service location, service providers and network operators. Furthermore, customers may want to choose their services and compose a package dynamically without paying attention to the billing scheme used. The main premise of this paper is that pre-paid and post-paid billing schemes will merge and customers will use services according to their account balance and credits, as opposed to their billing scheme. The requirement on service providers is to use OSS (operations support system) functions and the accompanying information model to support diverse pricing and billing schemes, which is a complex task. This paper presents key OSS functions and an information model that tackle this complexity. Challenges are described and requirements are defined. Related efforts are highlighted, and the context surrounding this work is laid out in detail. Finally, individual entities of information model and OSS functions are defined and an example using flow-chart to illustrate interaction of functions is presented.