Nowadays, more and more companies would like to employ AAA GW real-time rating, yet they are faced with many questions. In this article, some of these will be answered, the conventional batch rating will be contrasted with real-time rating, and some benefits of the latter will be shown.
In conventional batch rating, all event data are read from CDR/EDR files after events are already finished. Event data are processed, rated, and charged.
In real-time rating, data are processed when events are attempted or even in progress. Events are authorized, reauthorized, and, at the end, charged.
When planning a real-time system, it needs to be designed in a way that minimizes the possibility of interrupting services or incurring any revenue losses. To minimize those, latency, high availability architecture, cm/dm separation per service for easier production maintenance, and efficient monitoring all have to be taken into consideration.
With realtime rating, prepaid and postpaid users can be accommodated in one system – such a system is called convergent billing. Realtime billing offers even more benefits, such as postpaid credit limits, and realtime feedback after customer usage.
In one of the next articles, more details will be presented regarding AAA GW, interaction workflow for calls (mbi,) and gprs/mms/sms (diameter.) Follow us on Twitter, and stay tuned.
