Active Accounting and Charging for Programmable Wireless Networks

A programmable networking approach to accounting and charging for services in software defined wireless networks (SDWN) could greatly facilitate the service innovation that is anticipated therein. It would allow service differentiation through customized charging and would support the provision of composite services across multiple providers. In this position paper we consider how earlier approaches to active charging can be combined with the 3GPP charging architecture, recent SDWN inspired cellular architectures innovations, including network virtualization, to provide an active accounting and charging infrastructure for SDWN. Our analysis shows that active charging in SDWN is technically feasible, commercially beneficial and incrementally deployable.