ABSTRACT
Charging (and billing) is probably the most important function of a service provider as it supports the company’s entire economic structure; yet, it remains one of the least glamorous parts of the network. In this chapter, we hope to shed some light on the “glamorous” aspects of how new classes of services can be enabled through a flexible charging mechanism provided through the 3GPP™ Internet Protocol (IP) Multimedia Subsystem (IMS) charging architecture. We will also examine the components of the IMS charging architecture.
