PRODUCTS / MEDIATION
  
Billing Components Mediation Device

The Billing Components Mediation Device component can reliably and efficiently provide and collect information to and from telecommunications networks. It provides the link between client customer care and billing systems and access networks. It has been designed to encourage quick implementation and reduce time to revenue. It implements the provisioning and activation of customer services in the network elements based on service requests received from customer care system or other systems.

The current Billing Components Mediation Device consists of two parts:
> Data Collection and
> Service Provisioning. 

Data Collection collects charging records from a variety of network elements such as switches, WAP, short message services, voice mail platforms and IN systems. The development platform supports a quick implementation of new filtering and re-formatting requirements. The records are stored in a Common Usage Format (CUF) for further processing by the rating engine.

Service Provisioning submits service requests coming from order processing systems to network elements, such as HLRs and IN systems. It provides comprehensive handling of messages and transactions. 

The future mediation device will be structured to handle further, diverse communication between systems. 


Mediation Device - Basic functionality
> Graphical user interface for monitoring and controlling
> Configurable alarms
> Configurable multilevel tracing functionality and statistics
> Transaction history
> Statistics (Performance, events, etc.)
> Parallel connection to multiple network elements
> Parallel handling of multiple transactions
> Automated redirection of the data flow in case of communication problems
> Automated processing and forwarding of transactions
> ASN.1 grammar based format conversion
> High performance and scalability
> Secured transmission of traversing data
> Simple connections of other network elements and respective support of additional data
     transmission protocols
> Supported network elements:
    - Switches (MSC)
    - Authentication Centres (AuC)
    - Home Location Register (HLR)
    - Voice Mail Systems (VMS)
    - Short Message Service Centres (SMSC)
    - Short Message Service (Information Service Providers)
    - WAP platform
    - IN platform (e.g. friends and family controller or VPN)
> Supported data transmission protocols
    - FTAM
    - CMIP/CMISE
    - MML (Man Machine Language)
    - TAP3
    - TCP/IP
    - CORBA
    - HTML
    - SOAP/XML
    - File based protocols
    - Customer specific protocols
> Supported vendors, e.g.
    - Siemens
    - Nortel
    - Ericsson

Mediation Device - Provisioning
> Rollback of failed transactions in a service bundle
> Status display of transactions in the Customer Care component
> GSM HLR interrogation and modification

Mediation Device - Usage Data Collection
> Archiving of usage data
> Integrity control (Gap Analysis)

Mediation Device - Additional Features
> Configurable filters for usage data
> Duplicate control
> Format error control