Development of a content billing architecture for a cell phone-based internet system

Abstract

The convergence of the cell phone industry and the Internet brings with it a myriad of services, to be accessed when on the move. It also brings a need for a paradigm shift in its billing mechanism. The current billing operation does not cater for different services on the same channel with different ratings. It also often makes it impossible to bill in real time. These two limitations may cause revenue loss for cell phone operators, especially since the South African market focuses on prepaid users requesting services that may range from as little as 5c to R10 or R20 per service. Additional functionality is needed to eliminate discouraging, non-configurable error messages generated by the network when services are down, or when real-time hilling systems refuse delivery of a service due to insufficient funds on the user's account. Motivated by these restrictions, it seemed not only sensible but very important to assess the state of the industry and available technologies, in order to define a new content billing architecture. Specifications and requirements for such a solution were researched and formulated, in order to complete the design and implementation. The choice for a cell phone Internet technology to support the new system fell on the Wireless Internet Gateway (WIG), as it caters to 99% of the South African market by delivering text-based Internet content to 2G cell phones. The content-based billing application (CBA) was developed and tested in the laboratory to verify its functionality and performance. It implements all the specifications and requirements. The CBA was then installed on the network of a South African cell phone operator. End-to-end performance tests on the complete system, including its latency and throughput levels, confirmed that it successfully implemented all requirements and business logic.