Policy and charging control architecture
The present document specifies the overall stage 2 level functionality for Policy and Charging Control that encompasses the following high level functions for IP‑CANs (e.g. GPRS, Fixed Broadband, EPC, etc.):
- Flow Based Charging for network usage, including charging control and online credit control, for service data flows and application traffic;
- Policy control (e.g. gating control, QoS control, QoS signalling, etc.).
The present document specifies the Policy and Charging Control functionality for Evolved 3GPP Packet Switched domain, including both 3GPP accesses GERAN/UTRAN/E-UTRAN and Non-3GPP accesses, according to TS 23.401 [17] and TS 23.402 [18].
The present document specifies functionality for unicast bearers. Broadcast and multicast bearers, such as MBMS contexts for GPRS, are out of scope of the present document.
NOTE: For E-UTRAN access, the usage of functionalities covered in this specification for features such as MBMS, CIoT and V2X is described in TS 23.246 [6], TS 23.682 [42] and TS 23.285 [48], respectively.