Billing status codes

One of the most important network elements in the mobile telecommunication services is Intelligent Network (IN). IN connected telecommunication services providers and customer needs in order to all services can run well. The main function of IN is related to the billing function that will be implemented to the customers during accessing the services. Customer request will be accepted or not depend on the status of the numbers they have, if the number is valid (active state and have enough balance) then it will be allowed to access the service and if the number is invalid (expired state and low balance or expired state but enough balance) then the service will be blocked

All services application will connected directly or through interfacing to IN to do billing process. In the CDMA network those application included voice and SMS services and Value Added Services (VAS), e.g. download contain services, WAP application, CDMA 1x service etc. Since IN has the most important function in the mobile telecommunication services then generally they built in multi redundancy and have high capacity occupancy. These are reasonable to make sure that all services will run well and services will be not interrupted if one of IN failed to served. Moreover, this deployment to make sure those services will still have good performance to carry out much traffic

CDMA 1x and Value Added Services as the one of the services that need IN availability continuously are sending request every time whenever subscribers activate the service. The huge requests are possible to be sent from one application service (more then a thousand request per second). Image if the mobile telecommunication providers have fifty millions subscribers and there are five services they provided. The IN availability become the main issue for such provider. They must provided many IN system in their network and fully redundant, otherwise the services will always interrupt once high traffic come. As the result their subscribers will leave them. Generally CDMA 1x and VAS services both have the same charging system or in the some case, sometimes VAS have separate billing system that built indeed. In the case they have the same one, the charging system will need to connect to IN directly or in many case IN provide the gateway to connect their SCPs. Others services that need to have IN services used to attach to this gateway.

What will happen once subscriber activates the service? Commonly there are two type of subscriber billing status; they are prepaid and postpaid subscribers. IN will serve to the prepaid subscribers only meanwhile postpaid will only write in each billing application services and will be report to the postpaid billing application.

Following are the process will be done by SCP once the request coming in the CDMA 1x and VAS services;

1.Application billing system will send balance query request to IN
Once the session is coming the first thing that will be done by application services is sending request to the SCP according to the subscriber status.
2.SCP will look into the subscriber profile
If subscriber is valid (active state and enough balance) then it will be allowed to access the traffic, otherwise it will be blocked. This checking also will look forward what kind of service (class of service, COS) they have in the database. If the profile it matched then those services will be applied to this subscriber and vice versa

3.SCP will response the request
If request from application service is matched SCP will send response to identify that subscriber is valid and allow to access to the service
4.Application billing system will deduct amount of balance
Once request is responded then amount of balance will be deducted as the charging for the service
5.Application service will allow the traffic
Subscriber then will be allowed to access the traffic for that much balance they deducted. Once subscribers need more traffic, the same process will happen until subscriber terminate the session, disconnect the service
Due to huge request sent to IN, sometimes IN failed to handle the service. The error message will be sent by IN to application services to indicate what kind of errors it is. Some of application services forward these errors to subscriber to notify why they failed to access the service and some of them keep these errors in their system