SIP Accounting

For definition of terms see RFC 2975

Purposes:

controlling resource usage (e.g., gateways to PSTN via which someone could place very expensive international or ‘premium rate’ calls)
real-time
- fraud detection
- pre-paid subscriptions
off-line
- monthly/quarterly billing
- deriving usage patterns ⇒ planning upgrades (resource dimensioning) , input for fraud detection, …

Resources to account for:

resources used by SIP itself

resource consumed once initiated by SIP

services initiated and controlled by SIP {voice mail, media translation/transcoding, …}

Slide Notes

B. Aboba, J. Arkko, and D. Harrington, Introduction to Accounting Management, IETF RFC 2975, October 2000. http://www.ietf.org/rfc/rfc2975.txt Links to an external site.

Transcript

[slide461] It turns out that some of these resources can be quite expensive. So, for instance, if we have a call going from our VoIP system out to the PSTN, someone has to pay the PSTN operator for carrying that call and terminating the call. So, we need a way of charging for that. We also want to do real-time analysis of the patterns of this to be able to do things like fraud detection, or how do we support prepaid subscriptions, where the user can use up to this amount and after that they don't get any service. Or we would do analysis offline to be able to do monthly or quarterly billing, or derive usage patterns. So, one of the really big issues for many companies is, if we can estimate what our likely use is going to be, we can buy a different plan and get better pricing than we can if we can't anticipate what our call volumes are going to be. We need to account for the resources used by SIP, the resources consumed once you've initiated the SIP session, and the services initiated by SIP, like voicemail, media translation, transcoding, etc., for which you may pay some premium price.