The IMS Second Edition: IP Multimedia Concepts and Services
The IMS Second Edition: IP Multimedia Concepts and Services
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Global trends indicate that the operators are experiencing a decrease in voice revenues and increased subscriber attraction towards rich multimedia services. IMS (IP Multimedia Subsystems) was envisioned to provide a universal service support network enabling delivery of such rich multimedia services. It also facilitates to chain various application servers thereby enabling delivery of blended services. SCIM (Service Capability Interaction Manager) is a 3GPP defined network element which is responsible for delivering blended services in IMS. Such blended services will gain significant importance in emerging telecommunication markets which will be predominantly prepaid. Charging of such blended services is a complex activity as multiple application servers are involved which bring in a variety of service contexts. Service Context is an important charging aspect which enables various charging schemes through which flexible service offering and improved monetization can be achieved. This demands a change in shift from traditional online charging solutions which are based on flat charging models to differential-charging models. Differential-charging allows to charge subscribers differentially based on various parameters like service context, location, time of day, type of content, mode of connectivity etc. Such differential online charging methodology demands a more integrated policy and online charging solutions. To the best of author's knowledge, there has been no literature for differential charging with SCIM over IMS network. In this paper we propose a novel architecture enabling differential online charging for blended services using SCIM. Also we discuss a use case with call flow to validate our proposed solution.