Comparison of pre-paid rating methods

Abstract

Despite the attractive post-paid tariff packages a lot of subscribers choos pre-paid mobile subscriptions worldwide to gain more control on their spending. Usually services requested by pre-paid subscribers are rated by intelligent node platforms in a real-time manner, but the implementation of these systems varies from vendor to vendor and there are several key characteristics which shall be taken into consideration when comparing these systems. This article summarizes some of these major characteristics and gives analytic methods to calculate the number of unit reservation messages and ratings which are important indicators to size (dimension) these systems when a new service is introduced to the mass market. Our analytic calculations are confirmed by simulation results.