General Accounting Process 

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... the telecoms’ domain, the RCB process has been very tightly-coupled and vertically-integrated with their services. Therefore any new value addition (e.g. cloud services) on top of the offered service necessitates a complete overhaul of the RCB strategy, and many times technological ones, by the businesses. In this era of mash-ups and composed services, there is a real need of a completely generic RCB platform that can potentially support any composed service today and in the future. We are conducting this research as part of Mobile Cloud Networking (MCN) project. MobileCloud goal is the conver- gence of the telecom and cloud worlds. Essentially it equates to: Mobile Network + Decentralized Computing + Smart Storage offered as one service based on cloud computing principles [1] e.g. on-demand, elastic, pay-as-you-go model. Telecom services are normally offered over vertically integrated systems, comprising of Radio Access Network (RAN), Enhanced Packet Core (EPC), and IP Multimedia Subsystem (IMS). These services are supported by standards such as Diameter [2] and Radius [3] that provides Authentication, Authorization, and Accounting (AAA) support. More details of the current state of the art can be found in Section VI. With the emergence of smart-phones and always connected mobile devices, more and more value is created by mobile application developers on top of cloud services. Tra- ditional telecom operators are being increasingly delegated to simply provide a dumb data pipe for such rich-experience mobile apps. With a departure from traditional service models, the tightly integrated RCB solutions used currently, are rendered insufficient in dealing with the new models in MCN that will support dynamic service compositions using elements from both traditional telecom domain to be offered as a service plus elements of clouds offered as a service. Each composed- service being offered to the user (the application developer, or a Mobile Virtual Network Operator), can be offered by a single provider in its entirety, or individual services could be offered by independent operators. This work plans to address this issue by providing an architecture that adapts to existing ones and models (Section IV) which help telecom operators embrace cloud computing principles and make an operator efficient through the use of clouds. In addition, MCN also aims at enabling new business models by extending the cloud, so that, an operator can provide customized bundled platforms comprised of cloud services and telecom features such as EPC to application developers. This would enable application developers to create next generation of fully integrated, rich mobile applications through custom provisioned app-development environments, customizing not just the traditional data-center elements, but also the elements of the telecom service stack. And therein lies the motivation and need of a model for developing a RCB solution which is generic in nature so as to support requirements (Section III) of composed services in a completely uniform manner. The proposed solution in this paper aims to be fully extendible in order to support new services that will be offered in the near-future. Regardless of the nature of service offered, a business must conduct an internal accounting process in order to bill it’s customers, and this process should be general across businesses and agnostic to the services offered. Hence in this paper we investigate how we can exploit this financial process for creating a completely generic rating-charging- billing model, as detailed in Section II. With the this approach, RCB as a service can be offered to any generic service provider and support both the traditional monolithic service models, as well as new cloud-based atomic and composed service paradigm. In order to comprehend the architectural design requirements on a generic RCB system, it is important to look into the overall accounting process and different pricing models that an organization could use in their billing process. In [4], the authors have captured the financial process for accounting cloud services. Figure 1 provides the overview of such an accounting process. It explains the general workflow and relations from the metering phase to the financial clearing process where the customer settles the invoice after the payment is processed. For our purpose, we slightly adapted the concepts to support cloud bursting . In our slightly adapted approach, various phases in the accounting process are • Metering - the process of collecting the various resource usage metrics of the consumers. This ...