14 Understanding the Services Framework

This chapter provides a conceptual overview of Oracle Communications Billing and Revenue Management (BRM) Services Framework and explains how to use it to implement prepaid services.

Before reading this chapter, you should be familiar with BRM concepts and architecture. See BRM Concepts.

About the Services Framework

The Services Framework is a collection of opcodes, storable classes, and utilities that allows you to quickly develop BRM support for any wireless or wireline service, such as GSM and CDMA.

You can use The Services Framework to implement the following functionality:

• Collect information about prepaid customers. See "About Collecting Information for Prepaid Customers".

• Manage prepaid services. See "About Service Management".

• Provision prepaid services. See "About Provisioning Services".

• Process authentication, authorization, and accounting (AAA) requests for prepaid services. See "About Processing AAA Requests for Prepaid Services".

About Collecting Information for Prepaid Customers

The Services Framework Manager client includes panels in Customer Center dedicated to configuring services for customer accounts.

When a customer support representative (CSR) selects a service for a customer account, the service panel displays deal and login information, plus customized subpanels for supplementary services, devices, and extended rating attributes (ERAs).

You customize the Services Framework Manager client by using tools in the Customer Center SDK, including BRM Configurator and JBuilder.

For information about using and customizing the Services Framework Manager client, see "About Customizing the Services Framework Manager Client".

About Service Management

Service management supports life-cycle management of prepaid services. For example, it activates and deactivates services when products are purchased or canceled.

To support life-cycle management of prepaid services, prepaid service management performs the following:

• Manages prepaid service real-time and scheduled (deferred) actions for features and promotions.

  • If the service activation or deactivation date is set in the future for the product or deal that a subscriber is purchasing, a schedule object is stored in the BRM database.

  • If the date is set to the current time, service provisioning is triggered immediately.

• Manages prepaid service status based on account management actions, including:

  • Updating service and ERA objects that are impacted when the product provisioning status changes.

  • Propagating service object Close and Suspend status changes when they have an unprovisioning impact on the supplementary services and ERAs associated with a service.

For more information about managing prepaid services, see "About Managing Prepaid Services and Extended Rating Attributes".

For information about adding new prepaid services, see "Adding New Prepaid Services".

About Provisioning Services

Service provisioning allows you to notify external networks when the status of a prepaid service or device changes; for example, when a service is activated or deactivated.

When the status changes, service provisioning does the following:

1. Creates a service order, which provides information about the service and the provisioning action required.

2. Sends the service order to the external network through the Services Provisioning Data Manager (DM), dm_prov_telco.

3. Updates the service order's status.

4. Updates the status of the service and device associated with the service order.

You set up your system to provision custom service types by configuring service provisioning. For more information, see "About Provisioning Telco and Non-Telco Services".

About Processing AAA Requests for Prepaid Services

Services Framework AAA Manager allows you to process AAA requests for prepaid services.

When a prepaid customer attempts to use a service, the external network uses Services Framework AAA Manager to:

• Verify the customer's identity.

• Determine whether the customer is allowed to use the service by verifying that the customer owns the service and has enough resources in the account balance.

• Record information about the prepaid usage.

• Set up and update the provisioning policy for the session based on the subscriber's total usage of the service in association with the offer profile for the purchased plan.

You set up your system to perform AAA for custom service types by using the Services Framework AAA API. For more information, see "About Performing AAA for Prepaid Services".

Services Framework Architecture

Figure 14-1 shows an overview of the Services Framework and other BRM components in a system that supports prepaid services. Components in blue are part of the Services Framework:

Figure 14-1 Services Framework Architecture

Description of ''Figure 14-1 Services Framework Architecture''