Convergent Charging System

Cerillion CCS is based on the industry standard 3rd Generation Partnership Project (3GPP) charging specifications, providing unified online and offline charging through a single high-performance convergent charging engine. CCS supports the new REST-based Nchf interface for 5G charging, whilst maintaining support for legacy and hybrid network deployments using Diameter and SS7/CAMEL where required. In addition, Cerillion Mediator Plus is offered as an optional extension to the CCS, providing additional mediation, session and policy management features as part of an integrated solution.

The CHF interacts with the Rating Function (RF) and Account Balance Management Function (ABMF) in order to authorise or deny service, or to send an instruction for the alert, automatic balance top-up or enforced termination of the currently active service. With dynamic balance reservation, the number of units can be tailored based on service type and usage, optimising performance and increasing scalability for high-bandwidth services.

The Account Balance Management Function (ABMF) stores and maintains the credit, debit and reserve balance data for an account. This data is central to the real-time credit control mechanism. The ABMF enables monetary and non-monetary balances to be defined, and an account can have more than one balance associated with it. For example, this could include minutes, loyalty points, free text allowances or gift vouchers. A balance instance can also be shared between multiple directly associated services through a hierarchical structure, or between unrelated services not within a hierarchy.

The ABMF supports operator defined policies for applications such as balance notifications, auto top-ups, overdrafts and service denials, as well as customer-defined policies such as spending control preferences.

Cerillion CCS provides a high performance and low latency Rating Function (RF) which applies charging based on specific usage or event content and rules. The RF can determine the value of chargeable events or network resource usage based on a wide variety of criteria including subscriber, network slice, origin, destination and balances information. In addition, the RF allows for policy and charging rules to be included in the rating decision making logic, thus further increasing the flexibility within the system to meet a rapidly changing environment.

The Rating Function enables online and offline rating based on exactly the same tariff structure. Due to the flexible architecture, it is also possible to deploy the online and offline instances on separate hardware. This allows optimisation of the high availability online platforms separate from the offline environment.

The Charging Gateway Function (CGF) delivers the required Ga interface to support receipt and onward processing of CDRs via the Bo interface to a downstream billing system (such as Cerillion Revenue Manager). It provides the functions to mediate the CDR from its native form into a standard CDR format for distribution to the Billing Domain, whether or not the CDR needs to be applied to an existing Account Balance within the CCS.

CCS provides support for real-time discounts to be applied based on promotional top-ups and balance eligibility rules. These promotions grant discounts to qualifying usage determined by configurable eligibility criteria such as specific usage types, destinations or ad-hoc account groupings within a set qualifying period. Furthermore, cross-balance discounts can be offered whereby usage of one balance may invoke a promotional discount or credit on another balance.

The CCS Dashboard is an integrated tool for monitoring and managing all CCS nodes, processes and databases. It provides a graphical representation of the real-time system performance, highlighting key performance metrics including throughput, latency and error rates. With in-app notifications and configurable email alerts, it ensures you’re promptly informed when performance thresholds are exceeded.

Cerillion CCS has been built to support the carrier-grade operation expected of modern 4G and 5G network architectures, supporting 250+ Transactions per second (TPS) per node, with 95% of online requests achieving a response time of <50 milliseconds.