Usage Metering & Charging

Internet usage is changing at a rapid pace, and multiple low signals turn out as the emerged part of new massive trends. As time accelerates, real time information is critical to take the right decisions. Besides, sampling information from the “pipe” is not enough to properly monitor internet usage and profile users.

The Vedicis Usage Metering service tracks events/data/volume & bandwidths to create tickets or set of information to feed either convergent charging and billing systems, or external DataBase for other offline analytics and Business Intelligence. The Vedicis solution does not implement sampling mechanisms to build statistics. It processes the full traffic required by operators, ensuring exhaustive information for a performant Customer Experience Management.

Advanced traffic metering

Vedicis Usage Metering service generates smart tickets (CDR+) or call flows (supporting Gx metering, Gy), depending on user profiling/charging requirements. 3 types of criteria may be choosen for metering:

• user information: IP/Ports, VLANs, and for mobile operators MSISDN/IMEI/IMSI/Device/User agent (Web browser+OS)
• traffic/network information: Applications/protocols/URLs/Sessions/Virtual Networks (consumer traffic, corporate traffic...)/V-lines(network bottlenecks)
• destination/geographic info: IP/Ports, Hostnames - OTT, AS/countries, CellIDs

Various parameters like number of sessions, bandwidth per APPs, or volume quota are available to create thresholds and triggers for data charging.

On-demand ticket/call flow generation

Vedicis Usage Metering service tracks the volume whether it is on the uplink, the downlink or in both directions, for the different groups of APPs. This information is available to build enriched tickets (CDR+ for post-paid services, for instance) or call flows (for pre-paid services or online charging systems), which therefore contain volume associated to the pre-defined APPs.

Instead of generating a ticket (or a call flow) for each IP session, the Vedicis web based billing software generates a single ticket providing a comprehensive view of the user activity. For example, if the objective is to track P2P traffic for a certain type of users, Vedicis solution generates, for these users only, one ticket including the volume exchanged during a P2P session, instead of sending multiple tickets for each technical IP session.

Configuration and interfaces for fast integration and straight forward operation

The configuration of this set of information is directly available from a GUI to ease data metering set-up and operation. These enriched tickets or call flows are provided with standard or customizable interfaces to third party components:

• Business Intelligence solutions, Customer Experience Management systems
• Prepaid or online charging solutions (OCS)
• Postpaid or offline charging solutions (OFCS).

Current available APIs support 3GPP standards and include Gx, Gy, Gz. File format may be tuned as well. For instance, Netflow based file format with Vedicis specific fields for additional information may be used.

Usage-based charging and business intelligence

The Vedicis Usage Metering & Charging solution delivers precise metering to allow content and application level charging, leveraging current charging and billing systems for pre-paid and post-paid services. It gives a precise view over services consumption in real time and usage visibility to monitor internet evolution with detailed or aggregated views of User’s profile (Behaviour, and Services interest). It is key to create real time business intelligence for Customer Experience Management to understand trends (new applications, new subscriber’s interests) and anticipate new business.

This is deployed as well as a LI probe (Lawfull Interception) to feed dedicated database for regulation compliance.