Architecture for a service-oriented and convergent charging in 3G mobile networks and beyond

Services will be the economic driver for 3G mobile networks and beyond. For the provision of new services a charging architecture supporting fast and easy integration of new services on the one hand and enabling versatile tariff models on the other hand is of vital importance. In this paper we present a service-oriented charging architecture. The key idea of the architecture is the separation of service-conscious and service-agnostic areas whereas the different areas are configurable by policy rules. A service example is used to demonstrate the operation and flexibility of our architecture.