Intelligent offline charging for a blended mobile non-SIP gaming service in IMS network

Gaming market is gaining rapid significance and recognized as one of the most revenue generating futuristic services. With IMS(IP Multimedia Subsystem) networks coming in to reality a new gaming experience can be provided to the subscribers by blending the gaming service with IMS service enablers such as presence, location etc. An intelligent service broker element like Service Capability Interaction Manager (SCIM) can deliver such blended services to the end users. Efficient charging of these services is very important and a real challenge since most of the interactive mobile gaming servers may not support standard 3GPP defined offline or online charging interfaces. Thus integrating these gaming servers requires lot of customization which may delay in rolling out new blended gaming services. Furthermore we propose a novel idea to charge such blended gaming services offline that are delivered through SCIM. We also propose a new offline charging interface C_f between SCIM and gaming application servers that enable exchange of charging information for the blended gaming service. We also discuss a typical IMS use case and its implementation details with a detailed call flow.