Charging and Billing for Composite Services in a Multi-Service Provider Environment: the IMS Case

In a saturating telecommunications marketplace network operators want to rapidly deploy services with minimum capital investment, while maximizing on revenue from service usage by customers. One way to achieve this is to create interfaces for 3rd party service and content providers to offer their applications and services to users. Composing and bundling of these services will essentially 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 service providers may become complicated. This work defines a framework that would allow for the effective charging and billing of services composed from 3rd party service and content providers. We propose the use of a service composer who mediates between an IMS network operator and the many content providers to create new services that are composed from independent applications; the composer simplifies the technical and business aspects of service provision while ensuring that charging and billing occurs within the network.