Towards an inter-domain billing system to support dynamic service provisioning

Today, billing is a big challenge for service providers. With a growing number of rich services such as music, mobile TV, Video-on-Demand and eHealth delivered to the mass market, service providers are missing business opportunities because current billing solutions are not fully capable. In particular, the delivery of on-the-fly composite services, composed of many service components provided by different service providers causes many complexities. This book proposes a billing system that deals with these inter-domain complexities. Moreover, the billing system provides an interim charging mechanism that allows for monitoring and updating of customer credit balances in near real-time. The system is designed to support large-scaled transactions and can be implemented in a commercial environment. Since billing is an expensive business process due to its complexity and high transaction volumes service providers may decide to delegate their billing processes to third parties in order to reduce operational costs. Additionally, the presented billing system can be applied to such a business model.