This chapter provides information about integrating Oracle Communications Billing and Revenue Management Elastic Charging Engine (ECE) with Oracle Communications Offline Mediation Controller.
Before reading this chapter, you should be familiar with ECE concepts and architecture. See the following chapters in BRM Elastic Charging Engine Concepts:
ECE Overview
ECE System Architecture
This chapter assumes you are familiar with integration points between ECE and Offline Mediation Controller. See "About Integration Points for Offline Mediation Controller".
Offline Mediation Controller integrates with ECE for offline network interaction. Offline Mediation Controller mediates offline charging requests from the network and passes them to the ECE system for charging by using the ECE charging API. Offline Mediation Controller uses a cartridge pack for connecting to the ECE system and submitting usage requests. For information about the Offline Mediation Controller ECE cartridge pack, see Oracle Communications Offline Mediation Controller Elastic Charging Engine Cartridge Pack User Guide.
The following steps summarize what you need to do to integrate ECE with Offline Mediation Controller:
Important:
Before integrating ECE with Offline Mediation Controller, you must first integrate ECE with PDC and BRM. See "Integrating ECE with PDC" and "Integrating ECE with BRM" for instructions.Install the Offline Mediation Controller software.
Offline Mediation Controller needs an installation of ECE to link the libraries and configuration for the client-side operations.
Install the ECE Cartridge Pack and create a node chain containing the ECE Distribution Cartridge.
When the ECE Distribution Cartridge starts, it automatically joins the Coherence cluster which gives Offline Mediation Controller access to ECE caches and invocation services which are required to send usage requests.
Send sample input for the preconfigured services to be sent to ECE as usage requests.
To send offline charging requests to ECE, Offline Mediation Controller uses the Elastic Charging Client. The Elastic Charging Client (client library) must be installed on the same server where Offline Mediation Controller is installed and where the ECE Cartridge Pack is deployed. Offline Mediation Controller configuration files refer to the ECE libraries from the location where the Elastic Charging Client is installed.
When the Elastic Charging Client starts, it automatically joins the Coherence ECE cluster which gives Offline Mediation Controller access to ECE caches and invocation services which are required to send usage requests.
See Oracle Communications Offline Mediation Controller Elastic Charging Engine Cartridge Pack User Guide for instructions on how to connect Offline Mediation Controller to ECE and submit usage requests to ECE.
For information about how suspense management is handled for offline charging, see Oracle Communications Offline Mediation Controller Suspending and Recycling Call Data Records User's Guide. ECE does not directly handle suspense management of CDRs for offline charging.