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Frens Jan Rumph
Profile: I am a researcher, technical consultant and software engineer based in Holland. I have specialized in Charging, Accounting and Billing architectures. From both a technical point of view (IETF, 3GPP, etc) and a business point of view (TM Forum, GBA).
Main interests: Telecom, Charging, Accounting, Billing, Service Orientation, Software Architectures, Software Engineering
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Ro Remaining-Balance AVP limitation
As I am currently doing a lot of research on IMS charging (online charging specifically), I am going through the 3GPP and IETF standards quite a lot. As critical engineer I usually tend to have some irritations or critiques. You’ll probably see me ‘venting’ this type of thing more often on this blog. Today’s irritation is a small limitation that I found the Ro specification. Well it’s actually just an opinion :). And perhaps I’m being just a bit picky, but why not go for perfection right?
The Remaining-Balance AVP can only occur once in a CCA. Furthermore, the assumption is made that balances can only be monetary. Is that all? Yes that’s all… But it is not consistent with the designs I expect for the counters managed by the Account Balance Management Function. Although the Rc reference point is not yet defined, the Re reference point specifications hints that a subscriber can have multiple balances/counters. This is hinted by the allowed occurrence of AVPs such as Counter, Counter-Price, Counter-Tariff and Impact-On-Counter. And it makes sense to me to have multiple balances! I need a monetary balance for pre-paid subscribers. But why shouldn’t we use the ABMF to manage things such as data quota’s, multimedia message quota’s, frequent caller bonus points, air-miles, and every thing else that can be counted for that matter! Of course this is still possible, only the OCS can never tell the UE about the current value of those balances through the Ro reference point. And all that can be fixed by adding an asterisk to the specifications 
Frens Jan Rumph