Implementation of a Single Funding Point Charging Mechanism

Most federations across the world apply Single Sign-On (SSO) Authentication and Authorization Infrastructure (AAI) platforms. Thus, access to services offered by organizations, which belong to such a federation, can be granted to their users independent of their current location. The increasing demand to charge users for those service usages lead organizations to establish various charging mechanisms. However, until today the majority of organizations is using service-dependent solutions to perform charging. This policy absorbs the utility of an SSO system, since users still have to monitor and control each credit account separately. Therefore, an extension to SSO platforms, which is consolidated, non dispersed and service-independent need to be implemented. A Single Funding Point Charging Mechanism (SFP-CM) allows users to settle payments using funds from the same credit account, for any type of service they use inside their federation. SFP-CM will equally support event and session-based services, offline (postpaid) and online (prepaid) charging, and it will handle price discrimination between users.

The high level architecture of the SFP-CM will be provided to the student(s). However the student(s) need to implement and configure the system in order to support prepaid and postpaid charging for at least one event (printing, SMS) and one session (VoIP call, Video streaming) based service.