Home // International Journal On Advances in Security, volume 4, numbers 3 and 4, 2011 // View article

Eruption of Policy in the Charging Arena

Authors:
Marc Cheboldaeff

Keywords: Rating; Charging; IMS; OCS; Policy; PCRF; PCC; QoS; QoE

Abstract:
In the early days of mobile Internet, bandwidth was not an issue, so price plans were quite simple, very often expressed in the form of a flat rate or “all you can eat” pricing. As long as capacity was greatly available, this was a convenient and simple way to define a tariff, both for the end-user and the service provider. With the tremendous growth of data traffic observed recently, bandwidth becomes more and more a scarce resource. Consequently, flat rate pricing leads to a minority of heavy users cannibalizing the whole resource, while being subsidized by low users. This is of course not acceptable! It is neither fair for the majority of end-users, nor profitable for the service provider. The goal of this paper is to study how service providers can grant the required quality of service to the “right” users, in other words to users who will generate revenue for their use. This will improve overall customer experience in the end, while service providers can see the return on their investment in network infrastructure by somehow “monetizing the bandwidth”.

Pages: 223 to 233

Copyright: Copyright (c) to authors, 2011. Used with permission.

Publication date: April 30, 2012

Published in: journal

ISSN: 1942-2636