Study on the account-sharing strategy for multi-services in IMS online charging mechanism

Abstract

A prepaid subscriber is allowed to simultaneously implement multiple services in online charging mechanism of IP Multimedia Subsystem (IMS). It is a noteworthy discussion to effectively distribute the limited account resources among concurrent services. An account-sharing algorithm is proposed for multi-services, which introduces resource reclamation and redistribution processes based on the resource reservation of standard specifications and dynamically adjusts them according to the changes of Quality of Service (QoS). Three performance indexes are investigated in the simulation experiments, which are average number of accommodated sessions, average number of completed sessions, and average number of iterations per accommodated session. The results show that in the normal QoS level, the three indexes of the proposed algorithm averagely increase by 18.7%, 5.4%, and 3.1% compared with the Prepaid Credit Distribution (PCD) algorithm, and by 2.1%, 1.0%, and 1.8% compared with the Prepaid Credit Reclaim (PCR) algorithm. In the poor QoS level, the performance advantages are greater, which averagely increase by 29.1%, 7.1%, and 2.8% compared with PCD, and by 9.4%, 4.1%, and 3.6% compared with PCR.