3G charging and billing; Stage 2 description
This Technical Specification describes the Architecture, Principals and Call Event specifications of charging and billing for the provision of service and services by a 3G system.
This standard is not intended to duplicate existing standards or standards being developed by other groups on these topics, and will reference these where appropriate. This standard will elaborate on the charging requirements described in the Charging Principles in UMTS 22.01 Service Principles. It will allow the generation of accurate charging information to be used in the commercial and contractual relationships between the parties concerned.
The call and event data generated by the network elements of the 3G network, is required for a number of telecom management activities including, but not limited to, the following:
• the billing of home subscribers, either directly or via service providers, for network utilisation charges;
- the settlement of accounts for traffic carried or services performed by fixed network and other operators;
- the settlement of accounts with other PLMNs for roaming traffic via the transferred account procedure;
- statistical analysis of service usage;
- as historical evidence in dealing with customer service and billing complaints;
In addition to the information collected from these network elements, network management functions are required for the administration of charging data.
For the purpose of the present document, the call and event data is considered to be collected, in real-time, by network element function (NEF) blocks located within the recording entities.
The data collected by the NEFs is sent to, or collected by, the appropriate Operations System Function (OSF) blocks for storage and further processing.
The location of the OSF is implementation specific and may, for example, be provided either by an Administration Centre (ADC) or integrated within the network elements themselves.
The following is beyond the scope of this TS, and therefore this TS does not describe:
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The objectives of this standardisation are:
• to provide the descriptions of events and triggers for the generation of Call detail records;
- to provide the descriptions for Call and event Call detail records;
- to produce a description of the collection techniques for accounting administration and CDR generation;
and
- to define a method for the transmission of CDRs over an open interface.