Accounting management for session mobility in an ubiquitous environment

With the convergence of the Internet and the mobile communications world, Internet-based services may become available on any user device. In order to make efficient use of such a ubiquitous environment the user demands to access his personalized services from any place, anytime and on any device regardless of the type of access network. In particular, we consider the situation that a user transfers a running session between devices. We refer to this as session mobility. Providing such ubiquitous services transparently to the user, is not only challenging from a networking point of view but also poses severe requirements on the management operations and in particular accounting needed for a commercial service rollout. We describe an accounting architecture for session mobility. It allows the network operators to determine, collect and evaluate data on service usage when users transfer their ongoing communication session(s) from one device to another or a set of devices within its domain or across multiple operators' environments. In particular, we describe the interactions required between the signaling protocol and the accounting protocol in support of session mobility.