Charging data dimensioning in 3G mobile networks

This paper describes an approach to analyse various charging mechanisms according to consumer behaviour. In previous work the authors have identified three major customer scenarios according to the service package and the relevant tariff models and presented a usage related study based on the number of charging data records (CDR) generated for different scenarios. Comparing the scenarios based on the volume of CDR has revealed that there has to be an optimal setting for triggers so that excessively high volumes of CDR are not generated, for low cost service transactions. It is also unreasonable to generate CDR in situations where the user has not downloaded any volume or was inactive. Therefore reasonable time duration for trigger settings and the optimal rate of CDR generation have to be assessed. The phase 2 of this work as described in the paper, addresses the dimensioning of CDR generation process by analysing the real network load to estimate how many CDR are generated at various points in the network.