A simple mobile communication billing system among charged parties

Abstract

Mobile communication is a milestone technology that has brought people a kind of universal convenience otherwise unattainable. From GSM to UMTS, the mobile communication technologies, like all the other great inventions in human history, have gone through such fast-paced advancements since the very first day it came to existence that each day we seem to be using a newer, more powerful device than before to talk to people close by or far away. We are so used to this convenience that it is hard to imagine how life could carry on without cell phones. However, when cell phone users roam from city to city crossing different system facilitators' domains of services, besides the conveyance of the signals, some charging problems may also arise between or among the service providers. In this paper, we shall present a simple mobile communication billing system that can help solve roaming-related charging problems. Our new system can be used in a wide variety of applications without having to modify the standard UMTS protocol, and it only causes slight, readily ignorable traffic increase. As we can expect, the new mobile communication billing system will be a friendly design that comes in handy for both service providers and users. (C) 2007 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.