This chapter describes the usage responses Oracle Communications Billing and Revenue Management (BRM) Elastic Charging Engine (ECE) charging servers can return after processing usage requests.
After ECE processes a usage request, ECE sends a usage response to the system that sent the usage request.
ECE returns usage responses to the network mediation system after processing usage requests. Usage responses include reason codes for indicating how the request was processed in the system. For telecommunications, the usage response is sent back to the network mediation system (or to Diameter Gateway) after charge calculations have been made and contains the result of the ChargingRequest operation.
For offline charging, ECE can send a negative usage response back to the network mediation system when the CDR related to the usage request must be suspended. A negative usage response can occur if the customer has not yet been provisioned in ECE, or if the customer does not have a pricing offer that can rate the request.
For online charging, ECE can send a usage response that contains an in-session notification about the active customer session. The in-session notification is a block within the usage response. For example, ECE can send an in-session notification about a customer's eligibility for a better rate during a calling period (in support of the Advice of Promotion feature) or about a customer's threshold breach information if they breached one of their credit limits for a particular service. FCE can also send the customer's remaining-balance information within the usage response. The network mediation system can use the data from the in-session notification for sending a message to the customer. See "About Advice of Promotion" for information about the data ECE sends for Advice of Promotion feature. See "About Notifications" for more information about how you can configure the ECE notification framework to include in-session notifications in the usage response.
For information about the different reason codes ECE returns in the usage response, refer to the documentation for oracle.communication.brm.charging.messages.usage in BRM Elastic Charging Engine Java API Reference.