Online Charging Based on Machine Context for M2M Communication in LTE

Efficient management of scarce access network resources for growing volume of Machine-to-Machine (M2M) communications play an important role in a Long Term Evolution (LTE) network. Understanding the communication requirements of machine-to-machine (M2M) services, and linking them to technical, as well as economic aspects, is a crucial step towards “smarter” charging of such services. We discuss the capabilities of M2M services to postpone their communication in LTE’s core network, called the Evolved Packet Core (EPC), to avoid times when usage of network resources would be expensive (e.g., while the network is congested). We introduce a context of a group of machines, which describes the postponement capabilities of M2M communication, which is used as an input to the online charging process. We illustrate the proposed approach and its benefits using a smart home M2M service as an example.