Telecommunication networks can generate a vast amount of transactions where each transaction contains information about a particular subscriber's activity. Telecommunication network consist of various interacting devices and platforms. Any transaction carried out by a subscriber is often recorded in multiple devices as it passes through the network. Telecommunication organizations generally need to be able to extract transaction information from these various network elements in order to correctly bill subscribers for the usage on the network. Transaction processing system is a subset of information systems, and in the telecommunications industry, forms an integral part of the management information system. TPS can be regarded as the link between the various network elements and platforms and the information management uses to drive the business. Call Data Records Each activity occurring on a specific network element within the telecommunication network, is recorded by the particular platform. All available information about the particular transaction is recorded and encoded into different formats. The recorded transactions, is called Call Data Records(CDR). Various formats and protocols are used to encode these CDRs, some example encoding protocols used includes ASN.1, XML and CSV . Some platform vendors develop their own encoding protocols for security reasons. Encoded CDRs are grouped into batches and periodically moved to locations from where the TPS can collect the CDR batches in order to process it. Gathering of CDR files The TPS is configured to periodically check each platform for any new CDR batches becoming available. The TPS uses standard network protocols, including FTP, SFTP and FTPS to transfer the CDR batch file to the TPS. Some platform vendors have developed their own file transfer protocols, in which case, the TPS need to be customized in order to retrieve the batch files from these platforms. The TPS is also responsible for ensuring the integrity of each file transferred, ensuring that no IP network errors render the file corrupt. Checking for duplicate files from the particular platform is also a responsibility of the TPS to ensure that no file is processed more than once, resulting in duplication of CDRs. Once batch files are retrieved from a particular network-element, they are backed up to long-term media. Some governments require that a record of each and every transaction needs to be stored infinitely in its raw (encoded) format. The batch sizes and frequency differ for each network-element and is also directly related to the number of active subscribers