End-to-End Application Billing in 3G

Abstract: We have 3G on the doorstep but nothing seems to attract ordinary people to this technology. To attract the mass market the telecom industry must show something beyond high bit rates. They must show how ordinary people can take advantage of this new technology. This is done by showing the possibilities of the new technology and by demonstrating applications that it will handle. The telecom industry must convince the telecom operators to invest in this technology and the only thing that matters to them is how much revenue they can make by adopting the upcoming technology. To convince the operators industry must show how the operators can charge for the new types of applications that will be introduced soon. This is the main reason why this Master's Thesis has been conducted. The purpose of this thesis is to provide a demonstration to Ericsson's 3G lab in Katrineholm in the form of an IP application with a billing solution. This thesis describes the migration from 1G to 3G and examines existing and future billing strategies as well. The IP application is an application that uses progressive streaming in order to stream multimedia content to a PDA connected to a 3G phone. This application is platform independent because it is placed on leading Web servers, Apache and IIS. The billing application consists of a number of steps. The first step is logging, which is performed by the Web server on which the streaming application is placed. The second step, processing and billing, is performed in the BGw, which is Ericsson's mediation tool, and the SQL server.The third step is displaying the bill, which is done by using ASP to create an active HTML page.