Moving from Legacy to Convergence 39
The charging data does not necessarily provide the information necessary to derive
charging and rating, but it identifies the services being charged for and the charging
entities within the IMS charging architecture that are responsible for the collection
and correlation of the charging data. This information is already being captured by
monitoring systems.
The charging entities themselves use the DIAMETER protocol to communicate actual
charging data based on what the charging entity derived from the SIP signaling.
This means that if the monitoring system is already collecting the SIP information and
can support DIAMETER as well, then all that is needed is a charging verification application
to compare the two sources for discrepancies.
Auditing of transactions to ensure they were successful (service assurance) and verifying
charges are accurate are two very important functions when deploying IMS. They
are missing from many traditional networks today, and operators are finding out very
quickly as they begin looking into these areas that they are losing much more revenue
then they first believed, simply because they have no visibility to the operations within
the network.
Operators simply cannot afford to lose revenues because of things they cannot see.
Likewise, they cannot afford to lose revenues because of service delivery failures.
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