Telecom Billing - Rating Engine

Telecom Billing - Rating Engine

The core of any telecommunications billing solution is its rating engine. Limitations in the rating engine's capabilities can lead to miss opportunities in the market and an inability to refine service offerings to meet evolving customer needs. In telecommunication domain rating is the activity of determining the cost of a particular call. The rating process involves converting call related data into a monetary equivalent assessment.

Call-related data is evaluated at various points in the network. This processed data is proven and authentic and can be used for charging.

Rating engine typically uses some or all of the following types of data about a call:

Time property of the call (day of a week, a date, time of a day)
Amount of usage (duration of a call, amount of data, number of messages, number of ring tones)
Destination of the call (domestic, international etc.)
Origin point of the of call to retrieve information about the location of the caller
Premium charges (third party charges for various services)

Typically individual calls are rated and then the rated amount is sent to a billing system to provide a comprehensive bill to the subscriber. Often the rating system is a module of a telecom billing system. Modern rating engines can also be currency neutral. Certain multi-national telecommunication providers provide the ability for subscriber’s settlement in multiple currencies. In this scenario the rating engine generates a currency neutral billing record.
A rating system must be flexible enough to the frequently changing pricing policies, as policies are defined as per current market requirements.

Rating Engine Architecture
A typical rating engine can have three-tier architecture:

Tier1
Tier one is the interface for external users. Clients, remote hosts, and external applications can enter, inspect, modify data, and initiate processes in comprehensive billing.
Tier2
Tier two manages transactions, and returns results to, the first tier, as well as manages all database access.
Tier3
The database tier comprises any RDBMS database, which stores business, administrative, and configuration data used in estimation of billing.

Rating Overview:
Various service providers such as AirCell, Airtel, Vodafone, MTS, Uninor, Idea etc. are available in market. To lure the customer, various skims are advertised in market, which leads to fierce competition in telecommunication space. The rating has also become complex as the customer requirements vary day by day.
There are various measures to calculate the rate for services provided by the service providers. The Rating is divided into seven operations:

1. The balance management is the first operation, which provides event authorization, advice of charge information, and customer credit reservations.

2. The event normalization is the second operation, in which input event and transaction data is converted into a standard format for storage in the billing database. The generated CDR/EDR may not be in a form suitable for the particular rating system. The mediation software normalizes the CDR/EDR and transforms the data in a format that is suitable for the rating system. To perform the rating calculations it is necessary to produce a Call detail record or Event data record. Event data records are used to calculate charges for various services provided by the service providers such as selling ring tones.

3. The event rating is the third operation, in which the normalized event records are aggregated and rated by applying the appropriate tariffs.

4. The event output is the fourth operation, in which the rated event records are stored in the billing database.

5. Fifth operation is the billing, in which the billed event records are aggregated, and additional charges and discounts can be applied For example, rating for multimedia services depends on various factors such as, number of minutes to download, copyright cost, clauses in service level agreement etc. This rating can incorporate non-network related parameters. The another example is, when usage above a certain amount is triggered in the billing sub-system, the rating engine may assign a lower rate for the user. This is also known as an adjusting rate.

6. Invoicing, in which billing data is combined with customer detail records and incorporated into an invoice or statement image.

7. Invoice output, in which invoice and statement images are printed or converted for electronic distribution.
The seven operations are carried out by the following three major components:

The rating server, which authorizes real-time events, handles credit checking, and passes completed events on to the rating engine to be stored in the database. It involves
Transaction management
Cache management
Connection authentication
Multiple client access
Asynchronous alerts

The rating engine, which combines normalization and rating. The rating engine is a series of pipelined processes, which primarily communicate using shared memory. Rating input is raw records; output is a database record containing normalized events and charges rated against the events (billed events).

The billing engine, which passes information back to the rating engine for the generation of recurring charges and adjustments, calculates billing charges, generates invoice data, and creates the invoice images for printing. Billing operations include the selection, sorting, and output of invoices or statements to printers or other output devices.