Harsh, Piyush, Benz, Konstantin, Trajkovska, Irena, Edmonds, Andrew, Comi, Paolo, and Bohnert, Thomas Michael
Rating, Charging, Billing (RCB) is the fundamental activity that enables a business to generate revenue stream depending on the resource consumption by their consumers. Traditionally, telecom operators have used custom designed, vertically integrated solution for RCB which often results in a complex system that is difficult to adapt to new service offerings. With telecom operator’s desire to capitalize on cloud computing by using their vast amount of infrastructure, the need for a RCB solution that serves the needs of cloudified telcos is needed. In this paper we present an approach to implement a generic rating, charging, and billing engine that serves the business and technical needs of both cloudified telecom services and those of cloud service providers. Key to this is a generic accounting process to drive the design of the generic RCB architecture. We show how RCB as a service can be offered catering to not only traditional telco services, the new cloud services they wish and will offer, but packaged cloudified services to the consumers and application developers as well. Finally, we detail how our architecture can be distributed and key services replicated to ensure high-availability. The end result of this paper is a solution that can enable telecom service providers to leverage the rapidly growing and accelerating cloud service market.