1. ECE Implementing Charging
  2. Using the ECE Java API
  3. Advice of Charge and Advice of Promotion

4 Advice of Charge and Advice of Promotion

Learn how to configure Advice of Charge (AOC) and Advice of Promotion (AOP) in Oracle Communications Elastic Charging Engine (ECE).

Topics in this document:

About Advice of Charge

ECE supports the 3GPP Advice of Charge (AoC) supplementary service by which customers can be informed about the cost for a requested service either in monetary format or nonmonetary format. AoC may be provided at the beginning of a session, during a session or at the end of a session.

To support AoC, ECE calculates the cost of using a service and relays that information to the network mediation software program, which can then pass the message to the customer.

About Advice of Promotion

ECE enables you to provide Advice of Promotion (AoP) information to customers to notify them that a better price can be obtained for a service they are about to use. For example, a network operator can send the AoP information in an IVR pre-call announcement for a Voice service.

To support AoP, ECE determines whether better pricing for a service is available near the time the customer's usage request is received. ECE sends that information to the network mediation software program, which sends a message to the customer.

ECE implements AoP as follows:

  1. A customer makes a request to initiate a session, to debit a specific or calculated amount of a balance, or to generate a price estimation for using a balance.

  2. The ECE charging server calculates the charge for the request.

  3. If AoP is enabled, ECE adds a time offset to the start and end time of the request and recalculates the charge using the offset time period (the new start and end time).

  4. If the recalculated charge is less expensive for the customer, ECE sends the information about potential savings to the network mediation software program in the usage response.

ECE applies AoP when AoP is configured at the ECE system level. Configure AoP at the system level by using the configuration service.

Note the following details about AoP:

  • AoP is not configurable in PDC.

  • AoP is a systemwide configuration (it is not configured on a per charge offer basis).

  • The ready-to-use configuration of AoP gives advice based on time.

  • When applying AoP, ECE uses the charge offers and discount offers eligible when the request is received to recompute the charge for the offset time period. If a different charge offer or a different discount offer applies to the future offset time period, AoP may advise a promotion when none exists or may not advise a promotion when a promotion is available.

When using AoP, ensure that your charge offers have tiered consumption configured accurately to prevent a credit breach of noncurrency balances.

To configure Advice of Promotion:

  1. Access the ECE configuration MBeans in a JMX editor, such as JConsole. See "Accessing ECE Configuration MBeans".

  2. Expand the ECE Configuration node.

  3. Expand charging.server.

  4. Expand Attributes.

  5. Specify values for the following attributes:

    • aopEnabled: Enter true to enable AoP or false to disable AoP.

    • aopVariance: Enter an amount of time in the ISO 8601 duration format (for example, PT10M, which specifies ten minutes).

      ECE uses the time you specify to offset the start and end times of the request and recalculate the charge for the offset period.

      For more information about the duration format, see the ISO 8601 documentation.