Reporting Category

The charging trigger can be of two reporting categories—Immediate and Deferred. The usage report of the immediate category must be reported to the CHF immediately. For reporting events that must be deferred, the SMF stores the usage report locally, and publishes either when the next trigger of the immediate category is invoked, or when the storage limit is exhausted.

When reporting stored usage reports to the CHF, the usage report is triggered because of the trigger type in UsedUnitCategory and the message is triggered because of the trigger type in ChargingDataRequest.

Sometimes, a scenario can have two triggers hit at the same time. AMBR_Change and QoS Change can happen at the same time. In which case, all the triggers as applicable at the RG level or session level will have multiple trigger values.

A trigger can be enabled at the RG level, and for some RG it can be immediate reporting and for others it can be deferred reporting. When a trigger event is hit, various usage reports will have a corresponding category filled respectively in usedUnitContainer.

Deferred CDR will be relayed in the following scenarios:

  • An immediate category event happens.

  • Maximum number of charging conditions are crossed.

  • Configured number of maximum deferred reporting is crossed.

Maximum Charging Characteristics (CC) is reset whenever there are push CDRs. This could be because of maximum CC limits being crossed or because of immediate category reporting.

Note

Currently, SMF does not support two charging descriptors with the same rating group.