Billing Mediation Systems

A billing mediation system is used to convert certain data types to other data types, usually for billing purposes. Telephone companies, which typically need to process Call data records use billing mediation systems.

The Call data records can hold data such as NPX,NPA, call duration, peak time flag, and call length etc. as per client requirement. This data can be represented in binary formats. The billing mediation platform typically reads this data and converts in to common normalized format.

Billing Systems and all other downstream systems, in turn, converts this data to its own understandable format.

Billing mediation systems mediate among a variety of other systems. The upstream systems are network elements, such as telephone switches, and the downstream systems perform accounting, auditing, archiving, or bill-generation functions. The mediation system collects, collates and prepares data for analysis by the downstream systems, which accept data only in a limited set of formats.

A mediation system performs the following tasks:

• Collection and validation of CDRs

• Filtering out of non billing-relevant CDRs

• Collating

• Correlation of different input sources CDRs

• Duplicate Record Detection

• Aggregation of partial CDRs related to the same call

• Format change and CDRs normalization

• Business transformation of data

• Decoding/Encoding

• Aggregation or Correlation

• Buffering

• Cloning

• Sorting

• Downstream Format Mapping

• Header and Trailer generation

• Downstream Distribution

• Error Messaging and Alarms

• Auditing and Reports

• Reconciliation

• Reference Data Configuration

• Provisioning services for the subscription.

Mediation is the first step after receiving a CDR fror billing. The mediated CDR is forwarded to a rating engine, which calculates the charge associated with the particular CDRs. Rating engine performs various tasks as per varied customer requirements for different services.

Mediation systems for Telecom domain support various other domains. The list as follows:

· Retail Billing

· Wholesale Billing - National and International

· Network Traffic Management

· Data Warehousing

· Reconciliation system

· Fraud Management

· Provisioning Feed to Sub-systems