LTE: How many types of charging scenarios come under the online charging system ?

Question

At high level, there are two type of charging mechanism. One is known as online charging and the other one is offline charging. I want to dig more in the online charging mechanism. How many types of scenarios come out in online charging ?

Answer 1

As you wrote, at high level there are two types of charging mechanisms one is known as "offline charging" and the other one "online charging". On-line charging in turn support three types of charging scenarios as following:
1. Immediate Event charging (IEC)
2. Event charging with Unit Reservation (ECUR)
3. Session charging with Unit Reservation (SCUR).
As of now I didn't go through all these scenarios in detail.

Answer 2

Hi Vikram,

You can get more details from 3GPP spec 32.299 which has given the details on Online Charging using Diameter.
Basically its of 3 types
1. Immediate Event Charging(IEC), for example we can do in case of SMS
2. Event Charging With Unit Reservation(ECUR), for example we can do in case of MMS which can support Image,Video attachment
3. Session Charging with Unit Reservation(SCUR), for example we can do in case of Voice calls or Data browsing

Thanks,
Chinmoy