Credit pre-reservation mechanism for UMTS prepaid service

Online Charging System (OCS) supports multiple prepaid and postpaid sessions simultaneously. Through credit reservation, the OCS assigns some credit units to a session. These credit units are decremented based on the traffic volume or the duration time. If the assigned credit units are consumed before the session is completed, an reserve units (RU) operation is executed to obtain more credit units from the OCS. If the credit at the OCS is depleted, the prepaid session is forced to terminate. During the RU operation, packet delivery is suspended until extra credit units are granted from the OCS. To avoid session suspension during credit reservation, we propose the credit pre-reservation mechanism (CPM) that reserves credit earlier before the credit at the GGSN is actually depleted. Analysis and simulation experiments are conducted to investigate the performance of the mechanism. Our study indicates that the CPM can significantly improve the performance of the OCS prepaid mechanism.