TY  - JOUR
A1  - Kühne, Ralph
A1  - Huitema, George
A1  - Carle, George
T1  - Charging and billing in modern communications networks a comprehensive survey of the state of the art and future requirements
JF  - IEEE communications surveys & tutorials
N2  - In mobile telecommunication networks the trend for an increasing heterogeneity of access networks, the convergence with fixed networks as well as with the Internet are apparent. The resulting future converged network with an expected wide variety of services and a possibly stiff competition between the different market participants as well as legal issues will bring about requirements for charging systems that demand for more flexibility, scalability and efficiency than is available in today's systems. This article surveys recent developments in charging and billing architectures comprising both standardisation work as well as research projects. The second main contribution of this article is a comparison of key features of these developments thus giving a list of essential charging and billing ingredients for tomorrow's communication and service environments.
KW  - charging
KW  - billing
KW  - accounting
KW  - communication network
KW  - architectures
KW  - requirements
Y1  - 2012
U6  - https://doi.org/10.1109/SURV.2011.122310.000084
SN  - 1553-877X
VL  - 14
IS  - 1
SP  - 170
EP  - 192
PB  - Inst. of Electr. and Electronics Engineers
CY  - Piscataway
ER  - 
TY  - JOUR
A1  - Kühne, Ralph
A1  - Huitema, George
A1  - Carle, Georg
T1  - A simple distributed mechanism for accounting system self-configuration in next-generation charging and billing
JF  - Computer communications
N2  - Modern communication systems are becoming increasingly dynamic and complex. In this article a novel mechanism for next generation charging and billing is presented that enables self-configurability for accounting systems consisting of heterogeneous components. The mechanism is required to be simple, effective, efficient, scalable and fault-tolerant. Based on simulation results it is shown that the proposed simple distributed mechanism is competitive with usual cost-based or random mechanisms under realistic assumptions and up to non-extreme workload situations as well as fulfilling the posed requirements.
KW  - Charging
KW  - Billing
KW  - Accounting
KW  - Self-configuration
KW  - Communication systems
Y1  - 2011
U6  - https://doi.org/10.1016/j.comcom.2010.10.012
SN  - 0140-3664
VL  - 34
IS  - 7
SP  - 898
EP  - 920
PB  - Elsevier
CY  - Amsterdam
ER  -