A policy-based billing management architecture for the next generation IP-based network

摘要

IP billing is not only a basic functionality to operate IP services, but also it is fundamental to offer customers with a stable and QoS-enabled network environment. As IP-based network has been widely agreed to be the core network of NGN, and existing IP billing system is too simple to fulfill the emerging requirements, the next generation IP billing has become an interesting topic in recent years. Policy-based management brings flexibility and scalability to systems by describing management logic and functions through policies, and thus reduces the complexity of the management of large-scale systems. Working on existing efforts, this paper proposed an improved IETF policy framework based upon which a policy-based billing management architecture for the next generation IP-based network was presented. Then a prototype with some basic functionalities was developed. The results of the experiment validated the expected improvements specified in this paper.