Charging of GPRS traffic for roaming mobiles by performing traffic counting at the user terminal

Abstract

The application relates to charging of traffic from terminals and in particular of charging of traffic from GPRS mobile terminals which are roaming in a visited PLMN (not claimed). According to the applicant's acknowledged prior art, either the traffic passes the home PLMN or the Home Operator relies on the Visited Operator to generate the CDRs to be used by the Home Operator for billing. Whereas the first solution leads to tromboning and inefficient traffic routing, the second solution calls for a strong trust relationship between the Home and the Visited Operators. The present invention circumvents both problems in that the terminal generates a traffic counting information and sends it to the Visited Network. The Visited Network generates a traffic counting record comprising the traffic counting information from the terminal and traffic counting information from the Visited Network. The traffic counting record is subsequently sent to the Home Network.

Dependencies are inferred from the claim text.