Billing Strategies and Performance Analysis for PCS Networks

It is predicted that by the year 2000, U.S. cellular carriers will invest billions of dollars for cellular billing and customer care. Two of the most desirable attributes of the cellular billing systems are the flexibility of upgrade and ability to inform the billing experts quickly about the status of the system to minimize any possible fraud and improve customer service. Although the second attribute can be realized by reporting the billing customer record in real time, this tends to congest the signaling channel, which is not desirable. In this paper, we propose several schemes for the provision of a quick billing status report which maintains low-signaling traffic. The performance of these schemes is derived analytically. We expect that these results may provide a guideline for the future design of on-line billing systems in personal communication services (PCS’s) networks.