Accounting Management in a TINA-Based Service and Network Environment

Abstract

The ACTS FlowThru project aims to build a management system that supports the flow of management information across organisational and technological domains by reusing components that have been developed by other ACTS projects. After analysis of the available components, it was decided to split the trial business system into three parts. The problems addressed by each of the three subsystems were taken from each of the three business process areas identified in the TeleManagement Forum (TMF) Telecoms Operations Map: fulfilment (i.e. service provisioning and configuration management); assurance (i.e. adherence to SLAs, fault and performance management) and accounting (i.e. service and network metering and charging). This paper elaborates on the realisation of the accounting system. This system consists of a TINA-based implementation of multimedia service access and control on top of ATM switching networks. Accounting components are introduced both at the service and network level. The accounting components are responsible for correlating network and service level accountable events, resulting in a single bill for the service subscribers. Using the Accounting system as an example, the paper also illustrates the development methodology and guidelines adhered to by the FlowThru project. The reader is assumed to be familiar with the TINA business model [1] and to have at least a high-level overview of the TINA service [2] and network resource architecture [3] concepts. Some notion of the notational conventions adopted by the Unified Modelling Language (UML) is also assumed [9].