1 ECE Composable Services Overview

Oracle Communications Elastic Charging Engine (ECE) composable services enable you to process and charge 5G events by using internal and external systems based on your business requirements. This document provides an overview of the available capabilities and system architecture.

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• About ECE Composable Services

About ECE Composable Services

The ECE Charging Manager (CHF) and Charging Gateway Function (CGF) composable services provide a charging and event processing solution that can be integrated with 5G network functions, ECE Cloud Native, Kafka, and downstream systems such as Oracle Communications Billing and Revenue Management (BRM). At a high level, the ECE CHF and CGF composable services act as a bridge between network and billing, revenue assurance, analytics, and similar systems.

You use the ECE CHF and CGF composable services to process 5G usage events, such as data sessions, SMS, and voice calls, generated by subscribers, and generate rated and unrated Call Detail Records (CDRs).

The ECE CHF and CGF composable services can do the following:

• Generate Unrated 5G CDRs: Transform unrated 5G usage events into unrated 5G CDRs for consumption by downstream systems.

• Integrate the CHF composable service with ECE: Enhance the charging capabilities of ECE by adding the ECE composable services and removing the dependency on CDR Gateway and CDR Formatter for unrated 5G CDR generation.

• Integrate the CGF composable service for Rated CDR Publishing: Improve the processing performance and scalability for generating rated CDRs with reduced dependency on Oracle Database.

The ECE CHF and CGF composable services make the CDR generation and the overall charging process more efficient, scalable, and highly available with features like CDR replication, duplicate CDR detection, sequencing, and CDR aggregation. They ensure that data loss is minimized, relevant details for each record are aggregated, and all generated CDRs are made available to their destinations in a standard format and in a timely manner.

You can deploy the ECE CHF and CGF composable services as a standalone architecture, or you can integrate it with ECE to combine their capabilities.

Note:

The standalone ECE composable services architecture only supports 5G unrated CDR generation in this release. To use the ECE composable services for 5G online charging and for generating 4G and 5G rated CDRs in this release, the ECE composable services must be deployed and integrated with ECE.

For rated CDR generation, both ECE components and ECE composable services are part of the overall charging flow. The integrated architecture provides a more flexible and scalable mechanism for delivering CDRs from the charging environment to any external billing and mediation systems.

As an alternative to using the Oracle Database and the Rated Event Formatter (REF) to persist and transport rated CDRs, the ECE composable services allow using the Charging Gateway Function (CGF) for CDR processing and Kafka as the primary event transport layer.

The rated CDRs generated by the ECE CGF composable service are published to Kafka, where BRM or other rated CDR consumers consume them using Kafka-based consumers. The same event streams can also be consumed by third-party billing, mediation, or analytics systems by implementing their own Kafka consumers.