A Framework to Provide Charging for Composite Services

Changing telecommunications market trends calls for the evolution of service creation and delivery by network operators. They need to maximize on any available form of revenue creation to avoid becoming “bit-pipes” and can achieve this by creating interfaces for 3rd party service and content providers to offer applications and services to their users. Composing and bundling of these services will create new services for the user and achieve rapid deployment of enhanced services. Effective accounting of service usage requires mechanisms for billing and charging of these services. Achieving this in an environment where the network operator interacts directly with the 3rd party providers may become complicated. This paper proposes the use of a service composer who mediates between an IMS network operator and many content providers to create new services that are composed from independent applications; the composer simplifies the technical and business aspects of service provision. KeywordsCharging, Service Composition, IMS, Multi-provider Composed Services.