Design And Implementation Of Billing Engine For China Uniconr’s Business Support System

In order to achieve the objectives of the operation of telecommunication services,telecom companies have different versions of the charging and billing products. Theseproducts are mainly used to calculate the end-customer’s telecommunications resource usage,but also as the important basis for the fees charged by telecommunications companies to theuser. Due to the features of telecom services expansion and telecom business support, thesecharging and billing products have different characteristics.With the deepening of the telecom competitive landscape intensifies and operationalcomplexity, the limitations of the existing charging and billing products in the businessfunctions, system performance and scalability are becoming more prominent. In the3G eraand the environment that operators change and recombine the reorganization, thecontradictions of existing online charging and billing products contradictions becomeincreasingly prominent.China Unicom’s business support systems, charging and billing engine, referred to as thecharging and billing system (BILLING), is the major subsystems of the Unicom core systembusiness support systems (BSS). Functions cover the acquisition and processing,preprocessing, rating processing, accounts processing, credit control and other aspects.Charging and billing system centralized, unified planning and integration of various businessfunctions, the integrated charging and billing system to become the systematic sharing ofinformation resources support system. Through the depth of customer segments, increase thediscount promotions and other mode, Charging and billing system achieve a refinedmarketing, flexible tariff billing requirements.China Unicom charging and billing system is a charging and billing system designedtaking the advanced telecom operators framework as a reference, while drawing the design onthe basis of lessons learned in the domestic and foreign operators supporting system. Thesystem takes into account the characteristics of practical, advanced and sustainabledevelopment. It not only increases the degree of processing automation, real-time andaccuracy, while constantly adapting to the needs of business and market changes, andachieving higher level of intelligence of the system itself. Charging and billing system canmeet the requirements of3G services, real-time, diversity, complexity of product andpersonalization of customer requirements.This paper takes China Unicom charging and billing system as object of study. is designed by the form of unified structure, the standard module, dispersing functions tovarious modules. The function of this system include four modules including the acquisitionand processing, pretreatment, rating processing, credit control. The same functional modulescan be reused in different business processes to improve the modularity and flexibility of thesystem.This paper takes China Unicom charging and billing system as object of study，for thedetailed design of the acquisition and processing, pretreatment, rating processing, creditcontrol module in the charging and billing system. On the acquisition processing module, thispaper involves in the network element equipment and other storage media such as data sourcecollecting original call bills or service records original files for subsequent processing of theoriginal data source; On the pretreatment modules part, this article deals with the formatidentification and validation of the original use of records collected, necessary to split ormerge the processing of pretreatment rules, then generate a unified standard record format forthe follow-up system; on the processing module part, this paper is mainly related to theinformation lookup and costs calculation on the use of voice, SMS, GPRS and other events;on the credit control module part, this article is mainly related to pre-set credit control rules,analyze user data, and alarm, stop processing the results.The research and analysis of the charging and billing system as a whole can providetheoretical support for problems existing in the real billing system.