Method and system for charging control

Abstract

The present invention provides a method for charging control in a Flow Based Charging (FBC) system, which includes the steps of: a Charging Rule Function (CRF) receives a charging rule request message from a Traffic Plane Function (TPF), the CRF sends a charging rule to the TPF. The charging rule includes an indication on whether to perform charging for a service data flow, and if the indication indicates to perform no charging, the service data flow is filtered but no charging information is generated. By applying this invention, operation in the TPF is optimized such that the TPF only needs to perform necessary charging instead of performing charging operation for the service data flow which does not need to be charged. As a result, the load of the TPF is reduced, so is the load of network devices, and system efficiency is improved.

Dependencies are inferred from the claim text.