Accounting and billing of wireless internet services in 3G networks

The development of the wireless internet market and its structure is driven by differing industry fundamentals, and the revenue derived from content and content-related services is expected to increase significantly for all players within the wireless industry. Providing flexible and scalable accounting and billing systems will be essential for success when offering wireless services to end customers. The third-generation wireless service providers have difficulties in billing their customers due to their inability to associate customer transactions with network usage, correlate data from multiple sources and flexibly support the emerging billing models. In this paper, an accounting and billing model for two wireless services is presented. The evaluation of the service proved that the number of roles and partners in the wireless services is huge and that an architectural framework including components like accounting agents and billing mediation servers is needed for tracking customer transactions and directing the accounting and billing between the partners.