The evolution of the Universal Mobile Telecommunication System (UMTS) creates an open market, where a large number of independent application/service providers will offer their services to the users through a limited number of network providers. Moreover, the convergence of the UMTS with the Internet world is about to alter the existing business models. The support of advanced business models is a chance but also implies new requirements. Among the important issues that are to be resolved in order to facilitate the establishment of these advanced models, is the support of innovative, flexible and efficient Charging, Accounting and Billing mechanisms. In this paper we propose the complexity involved in all these issues to be handled by an intelligent and integrated platform that will be responsible for coordinating the charging, accounting and billing process allowing all the involved players to affect dynamically these processes. Moreover, the generation of a single, itemised bill for all delivered services, which is required from the user perspective, is well accommodated in the proposed platform.
In this paper' we propose a novel architecture ,for value added services provision in UMTS networks. The key idea is to introduce a model, which is capable of handling efficiently subscription management, as well as charging, billing and accounting for value added services that are provided either by the network provider or third trusted parties. We propose a flexible business model inline with the arising requirements for openness and dynamic subscription and introduce an integrated system that employs a flexible charging scheme for each type of service usage (transport and value added), so that the user will receive only one itemised bill for all services. As a result, the user is able to access a large number of services provided by independent providers, without the need for any additional contracts.
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