What are the requirements for the 5G Monetization Solution?

Requirements for the 5G Monetization Solution

Without doubts, 5G has provided the much-needed innovation and flexibility for the Operators to look for different revenue streams & partnerships. 5G is bringing many exciting services related to eMBB, URLLC, and mMTC use cases.

(Click to enlarge) 5G Use cases and Services (Image Courtesy: ITU)

These services require high bandwidth (e.g. FWA, 4K content delivery), low latency/high threshold (e.g. AR/VR, Self-driving cars), and high density (e.g. IoT devices, Smart Cities) based on their categorization.

The excitement & new opportunities bring the challenges of monetizing these advanced services.

Network Slicing will allow Operators to provide dedicated logical networks with the virtualized network functions, storage, compute & processing capabilities to cater to different services & related functionalities. This will give flexibility to Operators to make use of their physical network resources in efficient ways based on the slice requirements.

(Click to enlarge) 5G Charging System and Network Slicing

5G Monetization solution should be capable to charge customers/enterprises based on their Network slices. In other words, the 5G Monetization solution should allow accurate Slice-based charging.

(Click to enlarge) 5G Charging System Requirements

Below are some of the requirements which 5G Monetization solution should support:-

Be Cloud-native so that features like serverless, elasticity, auto-scaling, fault-tolerance, etc. can be achieved.
To support both Online & Offline Charging methodologies to provide a Converged Charging solution.
To support Virtualization and Containerization.
To support Pre-paid & Post-paid payment models for allowing consumption of Services based on available credit balance as well as the credit limit.
Ability to handle advanced analytics to offer service personalization & upsell/cross-sell opportunities.
Ability to perform AAA activities on the network slices in action.
Architecture to be built using Microservices design patterns.
To follow Continuous Integration, Continuous Development, and Continuous Deployment practices.
To support flexible deployment options like Co-existence, Standalone or Full-stack deployments.
To support low latency and high threshold in processing charging requests at a very high TPS.
To support dynamic pricing configuration.
Tight integration with NFs like NRF, PCF, SMF, UPF, AF, etc.
To support backward compatibility with 4G & legacy networks so that charging requests based on protocols like Diameter & CAMEL can be mediated into RESTful APIs.
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As the 5G implementation use-cases and OSS/BSS transformation may evolve, many more requirements can be added to the above list.

OSS/BSS readiness & transformation gains prime importance in tapping the exciting opportunities offered by the 5G Network at this critical juncture. And, 5G Monetization Solution plays a very crucial role in this transformation.

NOTE: You can refer to my other articles to know about the Basics of Online Charging and Basics of Offline Charging. This is the series created to cover the basics of Telecom Charging and will contain more articles on 5G Network Converged Charging in the future.

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Glossary: 3GPP (3rd Generation Partnership Project), BSS (Business Support System), OSS (Operations Support System), eMBB (enhanced Mobile Broadband), URLLC (Ultra-Reliable Low Latency Communications), mMTC (massive Machine Type Communications), FWA (Fixed Wireless Access), AAA (Authentication, Authorization & Accounting), ABMF (Account Balance Management Function), RF (Rating Function), NRF (Network Resources Function), AF (Application Function), PCF (Policy Control Function), CTF (Charging Trigger Function), SMF (Session Management Function), UPF (User Plane Function), NF (Network Function), CAMEL (Customized Applications for Mobile network Enhanced Logic)