scope:

Purpose and Scope

This document specifies requirements and architecture for a family of protocols to collect usage data to be applied to a specified range of business applications across various packet-based services.

These protocols and architecture, a.k.a accounting management mechanism, should enable efficient and reliable delivery of any data, mainly Usage Entries from Network Elements and/or Service Elements to any systems, such as mediation systems and BSS/OSS. They should address the critical needs for exporting high volume of Data Records from the Service Element with efficient use of network, storage, and processing resources.

Standardization of this accounting management mechanism should provide technical information that is sufficient for practical implementations of interchange of usage data among Network Elements and/or Service Elements participating in the delivery of IP-based services, either within a single enterprise or across multiple enterprises.

The objective is to facilitate the integration of IP-based Network Elements and Service Elements into billing, reporting and Service Assurance systems. In particular, one key goal is to define a serviceindependent usage information model and exchange protocol to facilitate the flow of usage information from IP Network Elements and/or Service Elements to support systems.

This document specifies a high level architecture of this accounting management mechanism.

This document is intended to be a general delta document with the ITU-T recommendation "Y.2233" [1] as a basis. This document is not intended to provide detailed specific, point by point, section by section, differences from [1]

Future revisions of this specification are expected to make every attempt to preserve investments made by service providers and solution vendors by considering backward and forward compatibility whenever it is practical.