US 7,444,141 B2Granted

Method and system for programmable control of mobile communications units

OwnerSergio Rivera, Victor Maldonadoinventors

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Abstract

Accordingly, the present invention provides a toolkit for building programmable rules of operation for a prepaid mobile communications unit and for loading the rules into the prepaid mobile unit's internal memory. A rules development language is provided with a predetermined syntax. A rule set is composed of sentences comprising strings of sequential operands terminated by a delimiter operand. Each operand comprises a low-level operator and its corresponding argument. The function of each low-level operator is predefined, with the number of corresponding arguments varying according to the operator type. Once constructed, the rules are compressed and loaded into the internal memory of a prepaid mobile unit and used to determine call restrictions, click rates, surcharges, or otherwise process calls. The compressed rules are encoded into number segments which are delivered to the internal memory of the prepaid mobile unit using a transport mechanism such as, for example, the mobile unit's keypad, or using an over-the-air transport protocol. Inside the communication device mobile communications unit, the compressed rules are then reassembled from the received number segments and stored in the internal memory of the communication device mobile communications device.

Claims6

Dependent claims

A method for providing internally stored rules of operation to a mobile communications device, the method comprising:

comprising one or more absolute rules wherein:
the absolute rules are composed of one or more operand sentences;
each operand sentence includes a sequence of one or more operands;
each operand is separated from the next sequential operand by an implicit boolean AND operator;
each operand sentence is terminated by a delimiter operand, the delimiter operand corresponding to a result;
each of the operand sentences is sequentially evaluated, the evaluation being either true or false;
an operand sentence evaluation of false causes the next sequential operand sentence to be evaluated;
an operand sentence evaluation of true halts further operand sentence evaluation, the delimiter value of said true operand sentence being the result dictated by the absolute rules;
using a predefined rules development language to compose one or more rules of operation in a text format;
converting the rules of operation from the text format into a compressed format;
encoding the compressed rules of operation into a sequence of numbers;
using a transport mechanism to transfer the number sequence to an internal memory area of the mobile communications unit;
decoding the number sequence into compressed rules of operation;
and
storing the compressed rules of operation in predefined areas of nonvolatile random access memory of the mobile communications unit.

12 more elements

Dependencies are inferred from the claim text.