OSS/BSS: Preparing for Convergence

Telecom service providers are to day participants in a fiercely competitive
arena and all the players, irrespective of their location or size, are putting
their best efforts in either retaining their subscribers or acquiring new ones.
Technology itself is moving at a massive pace forcing all operators to make
large scale investments on the network infrastructure, at the same time expand
the scope of the OSS and BSS applications.

Dittberner Associates Inc, which is an international market research and
consultancy specializing in OSS & BSS areas, forecasts that the worldwide
market for mediation software and services will grow to $1.25 billion in 2009,
from an estimated $824 million in 2004.

Gone are the days when mediation applications were simple home grown
"utilities" which took the usage records from the tape drives and
reformatted them for the billing application alone. These utilities hardly
allowed any flexibility and the entire processing logic was hard coded. Today a
far greater role is envisaged from the mediation system.

Over and above convergence, the mediation system is supposed to address the
needs of service unification and session mobility.

Basic Mediation

At an elementary level, any service access — voice, data or video,
generates a usage record commonly referred to as UDR (usage data record) which
may typically have ten to a few hundred attributes reflecting the various usage
parameters. These attributes may include basic information like type of service,
subscriber identity, time of access and duration to more complex items like
quality of service (QoS), route identity and others. The primary role of the
mediation system is to collect all the UDRs from the various sources (typically
referred to as network elements or NE) and deliver the reformatted data to end
applications like billing systems, network monitoring systems, fraud management
systems, revenue assurance system or other such applications which require the
formatted UDR information as their input.

Current trends suggest that all operators, because of usage records that
could not be billed lose revenue to the tune of 6 to 10%. Further analysis shows
that out of the various reasons available for revenue leakage, 34% can be
attributed to areas related to mediation; common causes being data corruption,
parsing errors, correlation errors, synchronization errors, duplicate records,
delayed or lost records and buffer over-run issues.

Operators, therefore, need to be extremely careful while choosing their
mediation system so that the system is robust enough and can minimize the loss
in revenue by making all the UDRs available to the end billing system.

What You Need

Online Usage Collection: The sources of UDRs may be Telecom switches which
cater to wireless or wire line services or components of the IP network like
DHCP, RADIUS, WEB server or even network elements that provide multimedia or
cable services like pay per view (PPV) and video on demand (VOD). The mediation
system thus needs to be capable of interfacing to different network elements
located in different geographies based on the different communication protocols
supported by the network element and provide online collection of UDRs. Some
common protocols used for handshaking are TCP/IP, HDLC, X.25 and RS232. Certain
switch vendors have even developed proprietary protocols for data transfer and
the mediation system has to adapt to these requirements to facilitate online
collection of usage records.

The requirement of having an offline collection mechanism using a tape or
some other external media has now become redundant as operators understand that
offline handling of data opens up room for files getting lost in transit, data
loss through media corruption and media over-run leading to revenue loss.
Besides this the offline mechanism also limits the operator in providing
services like hot-billing and warm billing where the requirement is for near
real time UDR processing.

Data Correlation & Aggregation: Today there are scenarios
(typically in the IP world) where a single service is offered through multiple
network elements. This implies that records from different sources need to be
correlated so as to be meaningful for the billing system. Similarly in case of
long duration calls, the network element may generate intermediate records
rather than one single record. In such cases, the mediation system is expected
to aggregate all these partial records into one record for the billing system.
Correlation and Aggregation therefore become important considerations for any
mediation deployment.

Error Correction: Validations at the Billing end are more focused on
subscriber service information and hence errors that creep in because of usage
data corruption or wrong correlation of usage data.

So apart from validation and duplicate check, an important
aspect to be considered is the ability to correct invalid and rejected records.
It has been observed that under certain scenarios, the network itself generates
records where some fields have incorrect value and are, therefore, prone to
getting rejected by the end application. Correcting these records individually
or in bulk (rule driven) further helps the operator in protecting revenue loss.

Rule Engine: All major mediation products today
include some form of a "rule engine" which allows the operator to
transfer business logic into application logic. The ease in defining rules
through either the GUI or through proprietary scripts is now an important factor
in evaluating various mediation systems. The rule engine thus turns out to be
the core where the bulk of the processing logic can be built and the same can be
easily changed as and when required.

Mediation systems also have the ability to provide the first
level feed on revenue creation as the system can actually generate audit data on
the records that flow in. This can be very effective in answering such basic
questions as how many records were collected, how many were billable valid
records, how many records were rejected, what was the reason for rejection and
how many were duplicate records. Even in case of valid records it may be
possible to have details on the type of records — e.g. in case of telephony a
single file may have incoming call records, outgoing call records, SMS records,
MMS records etc. The ability to monitor the fate of each record as it enters the
billing system can actually help the operator tremendously in controlling his
operations and helping him identify any leakage areas in the revenue duct ahead.

Web Based Management: Most large operators have
countrywide operations and not everything may require central monitoring or
control. A web-based access thus becomes a logical requirement as the mediation
users may access the application from anywhere and carry out the operations
easily.

Easy & Quick Addition of NE: Similarly, with new
technological advancements, addition of new network elements has become a
regular aspect of any operator's network. The mediation system should
therefore be scaleable and allow easy addition or deletion of network elements
without requiring major application level changes.

Advanced Reporting: Apart from leakage related
aspects, operators also wish to enhance the use of UDR records by having the
ability to analyze the usage pattern and arrive at some trends and forecasts for
revenue and network optimization. The mediation system is the first application
where all the usage data comes in. An efficient tracking mechanism can therefore
track the fate of each and every record as it moves through the various layers.
This data can be used in generating detailed trend reports on the usage patterns
and may be an important input for senior management in tracking revenue right
from the source. Traditionally this is an area, which is expected by Business
Intelligence or data warehousing application; however this is another area,
which is being looked upon as an extended responsibility of the mediation
system.

Real-Time Mediation: Mediation systems are
increasingly being expected to perform some fraud management related activities
and have also entered the pre-paid arena where activities like credit
authorizations need to be passed through the mediation layer. These aspects
reiterate the criticality of the mediation system not just in terms of its
"availability" and "response time" but also as a system for
guaranteeing zero revenue loss.

Product companies like Intec, Convergys, Openet, Comptel, HP
and UshaComm to name a few have dedicated mediation products which are being
implemented at operator locations around the world and all of them highlight the
importance of having a mature mediation solution so that each and every usage
record is available for revenue generation. As we move from 2.5G through 3G and
beyond, it is imperative that in the coming days mediation systems have a
critical role to play and operators would be expecting even more from these
systems in terms of revenue forecasting, advanced rule based processing and
resource optimization which is over and above their primary functionality of
collecting usage data and delivering the same to different applications.

Himanshu S Mahanta solutions architect, Mahindra
British Telecom vadmail@cybermedia.co.in