Federated accounting: service charging and billing in a business-to-business environment

The liberalisation of the telecommunications industry has resulted in a proliferation of new services and services providers. This is particularly the case in the rapidly expanding IP-based services market. Providers include ISPs, virtual private network (VPN) and application service providers, and backbone operators. The final service set delivered to the customer will result from the combination of these service offerings. From a service usage accounting perspective, this new environment creates a number of important challenges, which did not apply in the traditional monopolistic telecommunications environment. The first issue is that of multiple administrative domains from the customer and service provider side and the second issue concerns applying customer service level agreements (SLA) and quality of service (QoS). This paper addresses the issue of settlement of usage charges across several service providers when they collectively provide services to customers. The main issue is to develop standardised mechanisms that allow various business and operation support systems operating in various domains to exchange accounting information. The work presented in this paper focuses on the development of a business-to-business (B2B) service provisioning and management architecture to provide guidance to international organisations on the development of a federated accounting management solution. This architecture aims to be both open and adaptable and is based on standardisation work going on in TMForum (TeleManagement Forum), IPDR (IP detail record), IETF and ETSI (European Telecommunication Standardisation Institute).