Professional Documents
Culture Documents
10 1016@j Comcom 2010 10 012 PDF
10 1016@j Comcom 2010 10 012 PDF
Computer Communications
journal homepage: www.elsevier.com/locate/comcom
a r t i c l e
i n f o
Article history:
Received 24 July 2010
Received in revised form 16 October 2010
Accepted 22 October 2010
Available online 11 November 2010
Keywords:
Charging
Billing
Accounting
Self-conguration
Communication systems
a b s t r a c t
Modern communication systems are becoming increasingly dynamic and complex. In this article a novel
mechanism for next generation charging and billing is presented that enables self-congurability for
accounting systems consisting of heterogeneous components. The mechanism is required to be simple,
effective, efcient, scalable and fault-tolerant. Based on simulation results it is shown that the proposed
simple distributed mechanism is competitive with usual cost-based or random mechanisms under realistic assumptions and up to non-extreme workload situations as well as fullling the posed requirements.
2010 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.
1. Introduction
The charging of customers is an essential aspect of any commercially successful network operation and service provisioning.
Charging and billing systems in use today serve up to millions of
pre-paid and post-paid customers employing mainly time-based
and volume-based tariffs as well as at rate pricing to name the
most prominent examples. Their functioning, however, depends
on the accurate, complete and timely collection of relevant
resource consumption data caused by user activities in the
network. This latter process is called accounting and is brought
about by an accounting system normally being comprised of a
large number of heterogeneous accounting resources (meters,
charging trigger functions) distributed in the network and on service-level elements (e.g. gateways, application servers).
In this article we will address accounting systems for use in
next-generation charging and billing. In particular how to achieve
congurability is considered since conguring and administering
the resources of accounting (and charging) systems has always
been a work-intensive task. In order to face the ever-increasing
complexity we foresee that in the years to come accounting systems require more autonomy and intelligence than the congura Corresponding author. Address: Chair of Enterprise Platform and Integration
Concepts, Hasso Plattner Institute, University of Potsdam, August-Bebel-Str. 88,
14482 Potsdam, Germany. Tel.: +49 0 33197 992 567; fax: +49 0 33197 992 579.
E-mail address: ralph.kuehne@computer.org (R. Khne).
0140-3664/$ - see front matter 2010 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.
doi:10.1016/j.comcom.2010.10.012
In the following, we will introduce a novel mechanism for nextgeneration charging and billing that enables self-congurability for
accounting systems (Section 4). After a short overview of related
work (Section 2), we will present requirements towards such a
mechanism and that we claim our mechanism fulls in Section 3.
Based on a simulation study that we describe in Section 5 and
whose results we show in Section 5, we will show that our proposed
mechanism is competitive with usual cost-based or with a random
mechanism under realistic assumptions and up to non-extreme
workload situations as well as fullling the posed requirements.
2. Related work
The adoption and implementation of a new system or mechanism is normally a question of balancing the costs and the benets
of doing so. Additionally, external factors like complying with legal
requirements or meeting customer wishes and demands can also
be important drivers for the introduction of new systems, protocols
or applications. In absence of such factors, replacing an existing
system by a new one will in general be decided by answering the
question whether the new system can provide the same services
or functions at a considerably lower cost or allow for relevant
new or higher quality of the services or functions at the same cost.
In these cases, the existing system is the reference system against
which the new system is compared.
However, for the problem that we address, i.e. the enabling of
self-congurable accounting systems, neither existing nor proposed
solutions exist. In practice, static accounting congurations are still
prevalent that are often implemented as part of the respective services introduction project and are seldom changed afterwards.
Additionally, such changes often encompass a larger modication
and subsequent testing effort. Research projects that have often
built on standardised architectures or solutions of the 3GPP (3rd
Generation Partnership Project, c.f. [2]) or the IETF/IRTF (Internet
Engineering Task Force/Internet Research Task Force, c.f. [35]) with
the aim of further development were directed at congurability of
accounting and charging solutions but did not go beyond that.
Examples with respect to the 3GPP are the CAB (charging,
Accounting, Billing) service [6,7] of the MOBIVAS project (Downloadable Mobile Value-Added-Services through Software Radio
and Switching Integrated Platforms), which implements congurability of both accounting and billing components regarding given
tariffs as well as the service-oriented and convergent charging
architecture [8,9] of the 3GET (3G Evolving Technologies) project
which was developed from scratch to reduce the complexity of
charging in current mobile telecommunication systems by applying policy-based networking methods to congure all aspects of
the system based on tariffs. Regarding IETF/IRTFs AAA (Authentication, Authorisation, Accounting) architecture, we can name as
examples the generic AAAC architecture [1012] of the MobyDick
(Mobility and Differentiated Services in a Future IP Network) project, which resulted in a congurable architecture focussing on offline charging and laying emphasis on the transport level and the
congurability of the corresponding accounting infrastructure, as
well as Daidalos (Designing Advanced network Interfaces for the
Delivery and Administration of Location independent, Optimised
personal Services) whose A4C (Authentication, Authorization,
Accounting, Auditing, and Charging) system [13] builds on the results of Moby Dick by now also addressing service-level charging
and by integrating the online charging mechanism.
Because of this lack of a suitable reference system or more precisely of a reference mechanism from our own problem domain
that could serve as basis for a performance analysis and comparison, we have decided to take a suitable mechanism from a corresponding area of research and apply it to our accounting
899
900
With chargeable event we mean any activity within the communications network that utilises network or service resources
and that an operator may want to charge for [2].
As an illustrative example Fig. 4-1 shows for a simplied 3GPP
Accounting and Charging Architecture for a mobile telecommunications network what is needed for our accounting mechanism (c.f.
[2]). Here the 3GPP architecture is depicted as white background
boxes and the extensions as grey boxes. To each accounting resource (charging trigger function in 3GPP terminology) an already
mentioned Conguration Manager is added. The Tariff Management allows the network operator or provider to specify the pricing
and tarifng that shall be employed, which is then communicated
to the Conguration Managers. The dotted lines show that Conguration Managers are capable to communicate with each other.
Simplicity also becomes apparent in the information that needs
to be externally specied for our mechanism to work. This is on the
one hand the tariff, i.e. the set of chargeable events that need to be
captured and reported by the accounting system in order to charge
and bill subscribers according to this tariff, and on the other hand
the accounting capabilities of the accounting resources comprising
the accounting system. With accounting capabilities we mean the
set of different chargeable events that an accounting resource is
capable of capturing and reporting. Above that, no further information is required and consequently no further information needs to
be dened, for example by a human administrator.
The functionality of our mechanism is realised by a decisionmaking algorithm locally executed by each conguration manager
for its accounting resource and by the exchange of management
messages by which the conguration managers make their local
decisions known. Local decision-making is mainly about accepting
and releasing accounting assignments, i.e. of starting to, continuing
with or stopping with capturing and reporting the occurrence of
chargeable events of a special type that pass the respective
accounting resource. Beside, the algorithm also determines when
management messages are sent.
4.2. Management messages
There are two types of management messages: requirement
messages and conguration messages. While requirement messages are only sent by external entities like a tariff console or other
software that an operator uses to dene tariffs in order to an-
Operators Post
Processing System /
Billing Domain
Charging Gateway
Function
Charging Data
Function
Tariff
Management
Online
Charging
System
Configuration Manager
Accounting Data Forwarding
Accounting Metrics Collection
Fig. 4-1. Example Simplied 3GPP Accounting and Charging Architecture and its
extensions by the proposed mechanism (adapted from [2]).
901
902
res-id
req-id
assignment list
1
list entries
ci
res1, res4,
e1
req-id
e2
e3
en
Fig. 4-2. Management message types of the simple distributed self-conguration mechanism.
yes
yes
no
yes
Set A and B as
responsible for e i in
assignment list of
MCONF,A if not already set.
Set responsibles
for e i in assignment
list of MCONF,A to
that of MCONF,B .
Add A as
responsible for e i in
assignment list of
MCONF,A and remove
B if contained.
If configuration of A did not undergo relevant changes, doubl e attenuation factor x. Otherwise reset x to 1.
Save MCONF, A . Discard M CONF, B .
Fig. 4-3. Decision-making algorithm.
no
Set responsibles
for e i in assignment
list of MCONF,A to
that of MCONF,B .
Dt resend Dt initial 3 ci x
The resulting re-send behaviour of a conguration manager is
therefore in principle characterised by the managers sending more
conguration messages when its accounting resources condition
indicator gets lower, i.e. the status of the accounting resource is
deteriorating, and sending less conguration messages when the
condition indicator is higher, i.e. the status is better. The rationale
behind this is that a resource, having a low condition indicator
which means a high load, for instance, should actively try to change
its bad situation by announcing its conguration such that suitable other accounting resources with a better status and hence a
higher condition indicator can take over parts or all the accounting
load that the rst accounting resource cannot handle. If, in contrast,
an accounting resource has a better condition, rapid action is not required, such that sending in longer intervals is not a problem.
In order to achieve a greater weight for the accounting resources current condition, the multiplier for the condition indicator ci was introduced. When we ignore the attenuation factor for
the moment by assuming x = 0, this results in re-send intervals always taking values from two to 32 seconds. If the resources situation is really bad, it will announce this every two seconds. In the
other extreme, when its status is excellent, the accounting resource
will do so every 32 seconds.
Announcing a negative state however only makes sense, if it can
be remedied, i.e. if there are other accounting resources in a better
load situation (condition) to which chargeable events can be reassigned. If, on the other hand, all suitable accounting resources
have a similar status (i.e. equal condition indicator), re-sending
conguration messages has no effect since according to our algorithm re-assignments will not take place.
When the accounting system is under considerable stress such a
behaviour may even exacerbates the situation further by having
conguration messages sent which have to be generated, sent, received and processed but which will have no effect. To prevent
such inefciencies or even a counterproductive behaviour, we have
additionally introduced the already mentioned attenuation factor
x, which has a mediating inuence on this condition-driven resending behaviour.
Initially, the attenuation factor x is set to zero, i.e. the re-send
interval only depends on the accounting resources current condition indicator ci. However, whenever a conguration manager
broadcasts its conguration message without having conducted
relevant changes in its assignment list during the re-send interval
below, it doubles the current value of the attenuation factor (when
x = 0, x is set to 1). This increases the re-send interval.
Each time a conguration manager sends a conguration message, it sets tsend,last to the current point in time, re-calculates the
903
re-send interval and sets tsend,next, i.e. the point in time when resending will take place next, according to the following formula:
904
queue length behaviour (c.f. [26], for instance) at 99.75% load, the
latters depending on the workload model (exponentially distributed arrival rates of chargeable events) and the network model
(mean and standard deviation of the normally distributed processing times of the different accounting resources). If the waiting
queue of an accounting resource is already full, the arriving chargeable event is marked as dropped and removed from the network.
When an accounting resource processes a chargeable event, this
processing incurs a certain delay in forwarding this event (service
rate/processing time). This delay depends on the number of assigned chargeable events to this accounting resource. Each assignment adds a certain additional delay to the base delay that the
accounting resource incurs on a passing chargeable event. The base
delay itself is however independent of the number of chargeable
events that are assigned to the respective accounting resource.
The dimensioning of the accounting resources regarding this base
delay and the additional delays is selected in such a way that the
arrival rates of the chargeable events given by the respective workload scenario can be handled as long as certain load levels are not
exceeded (c.f. Section 5.1 for details about the employed workload
scenarios).
If the currently processed chargeable event matches one of the
assigned accounting tasks, capturing and reporting takes place.
After processing is completed, the respective accounting resource
forwards the chargeable event to the next accounting resource
on its path where this procedure is repeated. If, however, the path
is empty, the current accounting resource was the nal processor
of the event and the chargeable event leaves the system.
Besides, the simulation environment comprises an API (Application Programming Interface) via which conguration managers can
interact with and control their corresponding accounting resources
as well as interact with each other while simulation time
progresses.
905
The Normal Day scenario resembles average usage characteristics of an actual mobile telecommunications network with minimal load during the early morning hours and highest load in the
late afternoon and early evening. It is therefore the most realistic
of the employed scenarios. Obviously, slightly different shapes
are conceivable for this curve, but experiments did not lead to signicantly different results as long as the load factors over the day
remained within the shown range.
The Public Event and Synthetic scenarios check the respective mechanisms ability to handle load peaks. The former, which
may represent an event of public interest such as a soccer or football nal, comprises a considerable peak (160% of dimensioned
capacity) of long duration (two hours), while the Synthetic scenario consists of frequent peaks (every hour) with lesser amplitude
(130% of dimensioned load) and shorter duration (15 min) in order
to constantly stress the evaluated mechanisms.
We used two different network models for our performance
evaluation. The rst one, we called the mobile telecommunications network (see Fig. 5-2) which resembles a third generation
mobile telecommunication network in use today. It comprises in
all ten end-user services and ten corresponding types of network
elements. For each network element type an accounting resource
is present.
One accounting resource type belongs to the bearer/network level (Gateway GW), two types to the subsystem/control level
(Serving-Call Session Control Function S-CSCF, Media Resource
Function ControllerMRFC) and eight types to the service/application level (Multimedia Messaging Server MMS, File, E-Mail, In-
906
IM
Video
PoC
Games
IP Telephony
PSTN
S-CSCF
GW
MMS
File
MRFC
Multimedia
Teleconferencing
Internet
Internet Access
R9
R10
R11
R12
R13
R14
R15
R16
R17
R4
R18
R19
R5
R20
R1
R2
R3
R21
R6
R22
R23
R7
R24
R25
R8
R26
R27
R33
R32
R31
R30
R29
R28
907
Table 5-1
Overview of conguration mechanisms used in the performance analysis.
Criterion
Mechanism
Random initial
How is conguration
logic realised?
How are decisions about
(re-) assignments made?
When will re-congurations
take place?
Randomly, but
capability aware
Never, only
initial conguration
Randomly, but
capability aware
When resources
report overload
Optimised based
on accounting costs
Never, only initial
conguration
Optimised based
on accounting costs
When resources
report overload
None
Costs need to
be pre-dened
No re-conguration
costs need to
be pre-dened
The event per
overload resource
type that incurs
the highest cost
908
it or even makes a correlation necessary in order to prevent overbilling subscribers. This represents the desired effect of the mechanisms application.
As performance metrics to measure the effectiveness of the considered ve mechanisms, we selected the number of dropped
chargeable events, the number of incorrectly handled chargeable
events during the simulation runs.
Chargeable events dropped by the accounting system because
the number of incoming chargeable events could not be handled
and buffer overow occurred are recorded by the dropped chargeable events metric. With respect to interpreting this metric we have
however to differentiate between cases where the number of generated chargeable events so much exceeded the capacities of the
accounting system that there existed no alternative conguration
that could have produced less dropped chargeable event and cases
where the dropping was a result of badly conguring the
accounting system. The idea behind this differentiation is that
the conguration mechanism should be able to derive good congurations that prevent the dropping of chargeable events as long
as possible by intelligently and efciently distributing accounting
tasks on capable accounting resources. Only in this second case,
the dropped events metric is an indicator for mechanism effectiveness. As the number of incoming chargeable events is however the
same for all ve considered mechanisms with respect to a workload scenario applied to a network model, this metric (and the
other two as well) allows comparing the effectiveness of the
respective mechanism in the simulated situation.
The incorrectly handled chargeable events metric covers the
chargeable events that successfully passed the accounting system
(i.e. without being dropped) but were not correctly captured and
reported by accounting resources, i.e. they have either been captured and reported more once or nor not at all. In the rst case,
the danger of over-billing the subscriber exists if no countermeasures are taken, for instance by accounting data correlation. In
the latter case, revenue gets lost for the service provider as the service has been rendered to a user but no accounting data is available
for charging and billing it. Reasons for incorrectly handling chargeable events can be derived congurations that are incomplete or
incorrect but also the re-conguration process itself. In the latter
case, the actual conguration of the system does temporarily not
909
Fig. 6-1. Dropped chargeable events for Scenario 3 Public Event in Mobile Telecom. Network.
910
Fig. 6-2. Dropped chargeable events for Scenario 4 Synthetic in generic network.
Fig. 6-3. Dropped chargeable events for Scenario 3 Public Event in generic network.
911
Fig. 6-4. Incorrectly handled chargeable events for Scenario 3 Public Event in mobile telecommunications network.
912
Fig. 6-5. Incorrectly handled chargeable events for Scenario 4 Synthetic in generic network.
Fig. 6-6. Incorrectly handled chargeable events Synthetic with further increased workload in mobile telecommunications network.
6.2. Efciency
In contrast to effectiveness that only asks whether the desired
effect was achieved, efciency is directed at what effort this effect
was achieved. In this sense, a conguration mechanism should economically handle the input required or consumed to produce its
output. Input is in our case the resources that the mechanism consumes in order to generate an effective conguration of the
accounting system, or in other words, a conguration that meets
the objective of bringing about a continuously well-functioning
and efcient accounting system.
Our rst efciency metric is the management overhead of using a
self-conguration mechanism. We will measure it by means of the
management messages sent from a central manager to its accounting resources or between the different conguration managers in
case of our simple distributed mechanism. To have a complete picture of this overhead and since a signicant number of management messages are sent during mechanism initialisation, we also
considered the management messages being sent during the initialisation phase of the simulation runs.
The higher the number of exchanged management messages is,
the more resources of the communication network are consumed
for the conguration activities. Besides the number of management messages sent during a time interval also the size of these
messages is of importance for evaluating this overhead incurred
on the underlying communication network by the conguration
913
Fig. 6-7. Sent management messages for Scenario 1 Flat in generic network.
Fig. 6-8. Sent management messages for Scenario 4 Synthetic in Mobile Telecom. Network.
914
Fig. 6-9. Sent management messages for Scenario 4 Synthetic in generic network.
reason for this is not that a conguration was obtained that does
not lead to event dropping anymore but rather that no differences
exist between the accounting resources condition indicators that
decide about whether a re-assignment is to be conducted or not.
Therefore we nd a gradually increasing re-send interval which
can be seen by the development of the number of sent management messages.
The re-conguring centralised mechanisms of course send considerably less management messages since the decision-making
process for them is an internal computation and the messages only
serve to communicate the decisions and not to bring them about.
In contrast to their application to the mobile telecommunications network all three re-conguring mechanism show continuous activity in the generic network model (c.f. Fig. 6-9). However,
the initial reaction of our simple distributed mechanism is much
less pronounced but interaction rounds afterwards increase the
number of sent management messages during the second simulation day to about 32,000 while all centralised mechanism remain
well below 200.
As can be seen from the two representative examples above, the
management overhead is one inevitable drawback of our simple
distributed mechanism. As already pointed out, this is a direct
result of the distributed approach that we have selected and that
requires the distributed managers to exchange messages in order
to interact and derive their conguration. Depending on the overload situation these interactions can become quite frequent and
intensive in terms of sent conguration messages. For instance,
the user activity peaks in the synthetic scenario applied to the generic network model increases the management overhead that was
experienced in the preceding scenarios by about 50% to approximately to the already mentioned 32,000 messages (Fig. 6-9). But
even these relatively high numbers in comparison to the about
20,000 in the generic network model for the proceeding scenarios
do not really represent a signicant part in the overall amount of
transported data especially when we consider the number of generated chargeable events in the two synthetic scenarios, namely
about 11.6 and over 16 million events.
Additionally, the congurations messages remain relatively
small in the worst case and assuming 16 bit identiers a message
will not exceed about 600 bytes in the mobile telecommunications
network and about eight kilobytes in the generic network. For the
32,000 messages in the generic network model of the synthetic
scenario this would mean about 256 megabytes per day and
assuming that all 33 accounting resource types are assigned to
each of the 120 chargeable event types which is of course not
the case. When we assume in the best case which is more realistic than the impossible worst case as most accounting resource
types only support a very small part of the 120 chargeable event
types that there is always one resource type assigned to each
event type, then the message size shrinks to about 250 bytes, i.e.
to approximately 7.8 megabytes per day. We therefore come to
the conclusion that the overall management overhead incurred
by the distributed mechanism is negligible under realistic assumptions when compared to the transmission capacities of todays
communication networks. This proves our claim (C2).
6.3. Scalability
Our third requirement towards our simple distributed self-conguration mechanism is scalability, i.e. to acceptably retain for us
important system qualities as environmental or design aspects that
have an impact on these qualities are varied in scale within expected operational bounds. In our accounting context, especially
load scalability and structural scalability are of importance.
Load scalability in general asks whether a growing number of
incoming inputs (i.e. workload) which the investigated system
needs to process in order to function properly (e.g. returns results
with a certain accuracy and/or within a certain time span) may impede this proper functioning or result in inefcient resource usage.
What the term workload actually refers to depends again on the
system at hand. On the other hand structural scalability generally
asks whether the systems structure can grow (or shrink) without
causing problems with the systems performing properly. If the
number of objects constituting a system can grow without being
impeded by the systems implementation or by applied standards
(e.g. that cause address space limitations), the system can be described as structurally scalable. (c.f. [Bond00] for a more detailed
discussion).
Correspondingly applied to accounting systems, we require load
scalability regarding the number of active users, the number of
charged objects (services, service bundles) and the tariff complexity (number of different types of chargeable events resulting from
the tariff). All these aspects can be combined in the number of different types of chargeable events that a given operator tariff requires (i.e. the tariff size) and the number of actually incoming
chargeable events that need to handled by the accounting system
(i.e. the scenario workloads). Besides, our mechanism should exhibit structural scalability regarding the number of different types of
accounting resources that the accounting system comprises and
that need to be congured by assigning accounting tasks according
to the given operator tariff (10 accounting resource types in the
mobile telecommunications model compared to 33 in the generic
network model) as well as regarding their absolute number (i.e.
accounting system size).
Our performance evaluation considered both types of scalability
by the different workload scenarios and the two network models of
very different size. The two different network models also involved
different tariff sizes which lead to a larger number of different
types of chargeable events that need to be captured and reported
for generic network model (120 types of chargeable events) than
in the mobile telecommunications model (28 types of chargeable
events).
As we have already seen for the effectiveness metrics (Section 6.1), neither increasing the accounting system size nor the tariff size (i.e. the number of different types of chargeable to be
captured and reported) poses a problem for our simple distributed
mechanism.
In contrast, the efciency metric (Section 6.2) has shown that
the tariff size increases the size of the exchanged conguration
messages by resulting in a larger assignment list and the accounting system size may lead to a higher number of sent conguration
messages because more messages are exchanged per interaction
round. Consequently, increasing one or both parameters leads to
a higher management overhead and consequently could pose a
scalability problem. However, based on the results from the generic network, which already represents an operator network of considerable size, we cannot nd any indicators that the management
overhead does not remain negligible when compared to the overall
amount of data sent through the network during the same time
915
Fig. 6-10. Incorrectly handled chargeable events for Scenario 4 Synthetic in mobile telecommunications network.
916
6.4. Simplicity
6.5. Fault-tolerance
917
Fig. 6-11. Number of dropped events - Scenario 3 Public in mobile telecommunications network for different management message loss probabilities.
Fig. 6-12. Number of dropped events - Scenario 3 Public in generic network for different management message loss probabilities.
Fig. 6-13. Number of dropped events - Scenario 4 Synthetic in mobile telecommunications network for different management message loss probabilities.
918
Fig. 6-14. Incorrectly handled chargeable events Scenario 3 Public in mobile telecommunications network for different management message loss probabilities.
relinquishing accounting resource, such that it can adapt its conguration accordingly and thereby complete the re-assignment process. If the rst message is lost, this has no impact on the
incorrectly handled chargeable events metric as no re-conguration will take place. However, if the second message is lost, two
(or more) accounting resource types will capture the same chargeable events and produce multiply captured chargeable events, i.e.
incorrectly handled events. With an increasing ploss this becomes
ever more likely, what the results of our simulation experiments
fully conrm.
Based on these ndings we come to the conclusion, that our
proposed simple distributed self-conguration mechanism is sensitive to losing management messages only with respect to correctly handling chargeable events. However, this sensitivity is so
low that we can consider it as fault-tolerant against this type of
fault. Even when 50% of all sent management messages do not
reach their destination, the resulting increases in incorrectly handled chargeable events remain insignicant when compared to
the overall number of handled chargeable events and mechanism
effectiveness is maintained. For instance, in the synthetic scenario
the percentage increased from 0.00020 for the loss-less case to
0.00076% for ploss = 50%. Secondly, we can conclude a decreasing
Fig. 6-15. Incorrectly handled chargeable events Scenario 4 Synthetic in mobile telecommunications network for different management message loss probabilities.
inuence of increasing network sizes on the impact of the management loss probability on the mechanisms performance. In contrast, for the tariff size we could not nd interdependencies with
the management message loss probability. With this, we conrm
our last claim (C5).
7. Conclusion
In this article we have presented a novel mechanism that enables self-congurability for accounting systems consisting of heterogeneous components, which have special capabilities and
capacities in form of accounting resources. In our context, conguration and optimisation takes place automatically and dynamically
by assigning and re-assigning accounting tasks to accounting resources in order to provide the required data in order to charge
and bill according to a given tariff. This process can have different
high-level requirements beyond that of simply charging correctly
which also depend on the system owners (e.g. operator, provider,
etc.) preferences. In this work we focussed on simplicity, efciency,
effectiveness, scalability and fault tolerance and our goal was consequently to propose, implement and evaluate a mechanism to be
used in present and future accounting systems having these
characteristics.
The problem that a qualifying mechanism had to solve was consequently a two-fold one, namely (1) to derive and enforce an
accounting system conguration such that the available resources
are efciently employed and the required accounting data about
user activities for the given tariff is provided as well as (2) to reevaluate and potentially adapt previously made and enforced conguration decisions when changes in the system environment or in
the system itself occur such that efcient and effective operation is
maintained.
In a simulation study we evaluated our proposed distributed
mechanism and compared it to in all four centralised mechanisms
of which two were based on an accounting cost-optimisation
scheme and two others on random assignment each having
one static (only initial conguration) and one dynamic (adaptation
of congurations after initial conguration possible) variant.
Based on the simulation results, we could show that an
accounting system employing a self-conguration mechanism
can signicantly out-perform an accounting system based only
on static/initial congurations, if re-conguration alternatives are
present in the system. This especially holds for communications
networks in which the users activity is not a-priori known and is
not deterministic such that overload situations may arise. In such
scenarios the capability of the accounting system to adapt itself
to these changes by means of a self-conguration mechanism results in a better accounting system performance than could be
achieved by permanently maintaining only one initial conguration. On the other hand, conducting re-congurations may lead
to incorrectly charged user activities (over-billing or not charged
at all) if no coordinative measures between the affected accounting
resources are taken. However, we could show that the benets of
re-congurations clearly outweigh these drawbacks when looking
at overall accounting system performance except in cases where
no or very little conguration alternatives exist. Then applying a
static approach is normally a good choice, as it incurs less management overhead and does not run the risk of incorrectly billing the
subscriber as a result of re-conguration measures.
Another important factor of inuence on the performance of a
self-conguration mechanism that we found besides the availability of conguration alternatives is the (potentially varying) qualitative difference between these alternatives that can be observed
during every-day usage, i.e. the respective impact of their selection
on the accounting system performance. Consequently, if it makes
919
References
[1] R. Khne, G. Huitema, G. Carle, Charging and Billing in Modern
Communications Networks-A Comprehensive Survey of the State of the Art
and Future Requirements, IEEE Communications Surveys and Tutorials,
Accepted for Publication, 2011.
[2] 3rd Generation Partnership Project, Charging architecture and principles
(Release 8), 3GPP TS 32.240, December 2008.
[3] C. de Laat, G. Gross, L. Gommans, J. Vollbrecht, D. Spence, Generic AAA
Architecture, RFC 2903 (2000).
[4] B. Aboba, J. Arkko, D. Harrington, Introduction to Accounting Management, RFC
2975 (2000).
[5] T. Zseby, S. Zander, G. Carle, Policy-based Accounting, RFC 3334 (2002).
[6] M. Koutsopoulou, A. Kaloxylos, A. Alonistioti, Charging, accounting and billing
as a sophisticated and recongurable discrete service for next generation
mobile networks, in: 56th IEEE Vehicular Technology Conference (VTC 2002Fall), 2002, pp. 23422345.
[7] M. Koutsopoulou, A. Kaloxylos, A. Alonistioti, L. Merakos, A platform for
charging, billing, and accounting in future mobile networks, Computer
Communications 30 (2007) 516526.
[8] U. Fll, C. Fan, G. Carle, F. Dressler, M. Roshandel, Service-Oriented Accounting
and Charging for 3G and B3G Mobile Environments, in: 9th IFIP/IEEE
International Symposium on Integrated Network Management Nice, France,
2005.
[9] R. Khne, U. Reimer, M. Schlger, F. Dressler, C. Fan, A. Fessi, A. Klenk, G. Carle,
Architecture for a service-oriented and convergent charging in 3G mobile
networks and beyond, in: 6th IEE International Conference on 3G and Beyond
London, UK, 2005, pp. 15.
920
[10] J. Jhnert, J. Zhou, R.L. Aguiar, V. Marques, M. Wetterwald, E. Melin, J.I. Moreno,
A. Cuevas, M. Liebsch, R. Schmitz, P. Pacyna, T. Melia, P. Kurtansky, Hasan, D.
Singh, S. Zander, H.J. Einsiedler, B. Stiller, The Pure-IP Moby Dick 4G
architecture, Computer Communications 28 (2005) 10141027.
[11] C. Rensing, Hasan, M. Karsten, B. Stiller, AAA: A Survey and a Policy-Based
Architecture and Framework, IEEE Network 16 (November/December) (2002)
2227.
[12] P. Kurtansky, Hasan, B. Stiller, D. Singh, S. Zander, A. Cuevas, J. Jhnert, J. Zhou,
Extensions of AAA for future IP networks, in: IEEE Wireless and
Communications Networking Conference 2004 (WCNC 2004) Atlanta, USA,
2004, pp. 15161521.
[13] P. Kurtansky, B. Stiller, Prepaid Charging for QoS-enabled IP Services based on
Time Intervals, Computer Engineering and Networks Laboratory TIK, ETH
Zrich, 2005.
[14] V. Poladian, J.P. Sousa, D. Garlan, M. Shaw, Dynamic conguration of resourceaware services, in: Proceedings of the 26th International Conference on
Software Engineering, IEEE Computer Society, 2004, pp. 604613.
[15] K. Geihs, M.U. Khan, R. Reichle, A. Solberg, S. Hallsteinsen, S. Merral, Modeling
of component-based adaptive distributed applications, in: Proceedings of the
2006 ACM symposium on Applied computing, ACM, Dijon, France, 2006, pp.
718722.
[16] H. Chen, S. Hariri, F. Rasul, An innovative self-conguration approach for
networked systems and applications, in: IEEE International Conference on
Computer Systems and Applications, 2006, pp. 537544.
[17] V. Cardellini, E. Casalicchio, V. Grassi, F. Lo Presti, Flow-based service selection
for Web service composition supporting multiple QoS classes, in: IEEE
International Conference on Web Services, 2007 (IWCS 2007), 2007, pp.
743750.
[18] C. Funk, A. Schultheis, C. Linnhoff-Popien, J. Mitic, C. Kuhmunch, Adaptation of
composite services in pervasive computing environments, in: IEEE
International Conference on Pervasive Services, 2007, pp. 242249.
[19] D. Chakraborty, A. Joshi, T. Finin, Y. Yesha, Service composition for mobile
environments, Journal on Mobile Networking and Applications 10 (2005) 435
451.
[20] F. Klein, M. Tichy, Building reliable systems based on self-organizing multiagent systems, in: 2006 International Workshop on Software Engineering for
Large-scale Multi-Agent Systems, ACM, Shanghai, China, 2006, pp. 5158.
[21] E.M. Maximilien, M.P. Singh, Toward autonomic web services trust and
selection, in: 2nd International Conference on Service Oriented Computing,
ACM, New York, NY, USA, 2004, pp. 212221.
[22] L. Xie, P. Smith, M. Baneld, H. Leopold, J.P.G. Sterbenz, D. Hutchison, Towards
resilient networks using programmable networking technologies, in: IFIP 7th
Annual International Working Conference on Active and Programmable
Networks (IWAN 2005), 2005.
[23] R. Khne, G. Grmer, M. Schlger, G. Carle, A mechanism for charging system
self-conguration in next generation mobile networks, in: 3rd EuroNGI
Conference on Next Generation Internet Networks Trondheim, Norway,
2007, pp. 198204.
[24] 3rd Generation Partnership Project, Service Aspects; Charging and Billing
(Release 8), 3GPP TS 22.115, March 2009.
[25] L. Duboc, D. Rosenblum, T. Wicks, A framework for characterization and
analysis of software system scalability, Proceedings of the 6th joint meeting of
the European Software Engineering Conference and the ACM SIGSOFT
Symposium on the Foundations of Software Engineering, ACM, Dubrovnik,
Croatia, 2007.
[26] J. Banks, J.S. Carson, B.L. Nelson, D.M. Nicol, Discrete-Event System Simulation,
Prentice Hall, Upper Saddle River, 2001.
[27] R. Jain, The Art of Computer System Performance Analysis, in: Techniques for
Experimental Design, Measurement, Simulation, and Modeling, John Wiley &
Son, New York, Chichester, Brisbane, Toronto, Singapore, 1991.
[28] V. Poladian, J. Sousa, F. Padberg, M. Shaw, Anticipatory conguration of
resource-aware applications, Proceedings of the Seventh International
Workshop on Economics-Driven Software Engineering Research, ACM, St.
Louis, Missouri, 2005.
[29] V. Poladian, A. Arlan, M. Shaw, M. Satyanarayanan, R. Schmerl, J. Sousat,
Leveraging resource prediction for anticipatory dynamic conguration, in:
First International Conference on Self-Adaptive and Self-Organizing Systems,
2007, SASO 07, 2007, pp. 214223.