The Evaluation of the Efficient Prepaid Scheme TICA for All-IP Networks and Internet Services

Future all-IP networks will support a variety of high-value IP-based services including the upcoming integration of today's non-IP services offered by mobile telecommunication providers. Besides postpaid charging, prepaid charging will play an important role in all-IP environments due to the financial control of providers and customers, thus determining effective economic management means for Internet services. Since existing prepaid charging solutions do not meet imposed all-IP requirements, a novel approach-TICA (time interval calculation algorithm)-with three variants has been presented recently in [14,16]. To prove its optimized performance for many service mixes foreseen, this paper performs a thorough evaluation based on different scenarios. Additionally, comparing TICA's overall performance with existing online charging solutions shows TICA's promising results in terms of way smaller quantity of credit checks required and smaller financial risks for providers to be achieved. Finally, the three TICA variants reveal a clear sensitivity to defined input parameters. These findings indicate that a numbers of suitable settings can be used by service providers.