Charging & Rating Engine

Overview

The Real Time Charging & Rating Engine platform allows the operator to keep records of service usage by subscribers. The platform includes a quota management subsystem (Quota Manager), which keeps track of services used by subscribers on meters covered by subscriptions (subscription fees). The platform also includes a balance management subsystem (Balance Manager) that keeps track of subscriber balances (monetary and non-monetary). The billing subsystem (Rating Engine) allows you to create different flexible billing mechanisms for used services, such as: fixed cost, cost depending on time of day/day of week, cost depending on volume of used services, etc.

System modules

The Charging & Rating Engine solution consists of the modules described below.

Charging Engine

• Balance Manager
• Charging Application
  • Duration Based Charging
  • Event Based Charging
  • Usage Based Charging
• Quota Manager

Balance Manager

The Balance Manager system has the following features:

• The system provides a single convergent platform for managing the balances of all subscribers of a service provider, regardless of the method of settlement and the services provided.
• The system organizes a hierarchy of balances for the subscriber, which defines the rules for spending from balances depending on the type of service for each specific transaction.
• Executes balance change transactions in real-time, ensuring high performance and reliability of the transactions.

The Balance Manager system performs the following basic functions:

• Stores a hierarchical set of customer balances.
• Allows you to apply write-offs and top-ups (negative and positive adjustments) to balances, expressed in monetary and non-monetary units of measurement, both in real time and offline.
• Provides a mechanism for verifying and reserving balances prior to service provision to ensure guaranteed payment for consumed services.
• Manages balances for subscribers of the Counter type, automatically expands and rebuilds balances according to set conditions.
• Notifies external systems of events performed over balances, in accordance with configured parameters and rules.

Charging Application

The Charging Application subsystem consists of the following modules:

Duration Based Charging.

It provides charging of subscribers' sessions according to the time of corresponding service usage. The cost of services to be applied to a subscriber's session is defined in the Rating Engine subsystem.

Usage Based Charging

Provides subscriber session billing based on the amount of traffic used by a subscriber during a session. The cost of services, that should be applied to the subscriber's session, is determined in the Rating Engine.

Applying Charges based on usage/bandwidth consumed by the subscriber. Usage based Rate sheets are

Event Based Charging

Provides billing of events determining the usage of services, such as MMS, SMS, content downloads, Video-on-Demand services etc.

Qouta Manager

Quota Manager gives operators an opportunity to form package offers for their subscribers. Quota Manager supports working with packages (quotas) with different units of measurement (minutes of calls, traffic volume, number of messages, etc.). Quota Manager supports integration with AAA applications (AAA Server, Policy Server & HSS) and Charging Engine.

Quotas by time.

Pre-paid quotas expressed in units of time, for example:

• 100 free minutes for all local calls;
• 2 hours of free wi-fi access;
• 1 day of unlimited data network access (unlimited inbound/outbound traffic).

Quotas by volume

Internet traffic packets, e.g:

• 10 GB incoming/outgoing traffic when a certain service is connected (one-time package);
• 25 GB incoming/outgoing traffic monthly.