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B4E Solutions GmbH
Langen/Germany
Newsletter No 01/2003
A Publication of B4E - the Maker of B-oo-levard®
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B4E DELIVERS B-OO-LEVARD® RELEASE 2
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By end of February 2003 B4E has delivered the latest release of its Rating and Billing system
B-oo-levard® (Release 2.0) to the telecom practice of Cap Gemini Ernst & Young to finally prepare
to using this release for their outsourcing operation in Germany.
The new Release comprises of several new features further improving the capabilities of B-oo-levard®.
Today, we will report on three of the major enhancements:
(1) „Self Assembly Process“ to define new product and price structures
(2) Further Improvements to Prepaid
(3) Distributed processing across multiple network nodes
(1) B-oo-levard® Self Assembly Process
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With Release 2.0 a unique development has been completed: Thanks to the B-oo-levard® Self Assembly Process
the user is not anymore tied to the Billing software vendor when implementing major changes or even complete new
logical structures of products, services and price plans.
Now every such structure may be implemented or changed using an intelligent Graphical User Interface and decision tree
technology that goes with the Self Assembly Process. The user defines in which case
what kind of action the rating and billing system should take – something the IT-Billing staff has to do
anyhow when specifying new requirements.
Instead of sending a detailed description to the billing system vendor asking for a proposal, the B-oo-levard®
user draws with copy and paste a new decision tree or adapts an existing one, while the Self Assembly Process
generates the machine readable instructions for the rating and billing processes.
Quite frankly: we where not really sure whether this revolutionary approach to implement new Marketing ideas
into Billing, would be accepted by the user. Until to our very positive surprise users of a wireline/internet
operator learned during a “Proof of Concept Installation” how to work with this exceptional tool. After a
few training sessions they were able to implement new ideas on their own. The feedback was very encouraging. The
consequences are obvious: On one side Billing isn’t anymore the time setting factor when implementing new marketing
activities, while on the other side the cost to do that diminish to almost nothing.
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(2) Further Improving Prepaid
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From the beginning of its design phase B-oo-levard® has been a developed as a true prepaid / postpaid convergent
system. Its online real-time rating capability allows to process single events – be it for any prepaid
customer or be it e.g. an advice-of-charge request from a post-paid subscriber – and EDR/CDR-files coming from
mediation devices within one installation.
Based on the successfull co-operation with Comsys B.V.
www.comsys.nl
and the seamless integration with their product Speechframe®
a high-speed prepay platform has been made available at an unbeatable cost/performance ratio. Speechframe®
supplies any network event to B-oo-levard® and monitors/disconnects any conversation/event by being a Service
Node. This way, Speechframe® works for Rating + Billing in a transparent mode, which means for interfacing with
the network protocol B-oo-levard® doesn’t have to care about who the manufacturer of the network is.
This unique combination provides a future proof solution as Speechframe® is fully compatible with and
complementary to any IN/CAMEL/3G solution, while B-oo-levard® fulfils all what one would expect from a
state-of-the-art Rating and Billing system.
With B-oo-levard® any price plan combined with any revenue sharing model can be applied for prepay customers for
any product and service, such as voice, data, content, etc. in time and at an affordable price.
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B-oo-levard® Prepay Performance
Business Requirements
Total Customer Base
(combined pre-/postpaid):
10.0 Mio
5 events per customer + day all requiring Rating
Credit reservation + deduction
Load Profile requires B-oo-levard® to handle up to 1.500 call attempts per second
Max duration for response to IN:
20,0 mSec
Benchmark Scenario includes
Zone Matching
Revenue Sharing
Complex Rating (Simple Product, Best Option Plan Product + Discounts)
Business Account: Collection + Aggregation
Full Accounting
Hardware
Results
A stress test with 500.000 events resulted in a mean processing time per record with B-oo-levard®:
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(3) Distributed Processing across Multiple Network Nodes
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With the new Release the distribution of the B-oo-levard® application over several network nodes has been improved
as well. Of special interest for the internet service provider community is that B-oo-levard® now achieves an
excellent performance when using cheap Intel- or AMD-based one or two processor machines for hosting the
application as well.
To support a fully distributed system set-up the application has to be designed and built in the right way from
the very first moment. Take for example a credit which might be shared between several users or even contract
partners, or a 2.5 / 3G / Internet environment where several and different kind of services could require an
action towards the same credit account at the same point of time. If full distribution
is not considered during programming of the Billing system deadlock situations will occur, as the application
has to make sure that such events are always processed by the same thread.
The full distribution capability of B-oo-levard® is achieved by two concepts: One is the “Node ID” concept,
which means that every business object in B-oo-levard® has an association with a specific network node. However,
every such object can be instantiated on any other node. Second concept is the association with specific threads
of rating (or billing) events is achieved by taking the ID of the Resource, or the Credit, and so on. The
combination is used to form the correlating information being added to the event, thus targeting then to the
“right” thread.
On a network with 5 Linux PCs and a SUN 3500 connected by a 100 Mbit Ethernet the B-oo-levard® application has
been distributed over 4 PCs while the SUN has been used as the database server (Oracle® 9i and Solaris).
Through the 5th PC EDRs have been injected into the network, reformatted, queued, guided, rated and inserted into
the database. The business scenario comprised of normal products, but also “Friends & Family” and “BestOptionPlan”
products, shared credits, revenue sharing, complex account structures for large business customers, business
account aggregation, accounting, etc. The average through-put was at about 2.2 million events per hour – an
excellent cost/performance ratio.
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