Proof of Concept by Infosys

Proof of Concept: MATRIXX Online Charging & Policy Management Engine
_____________________________________________________________________________________________

Submitted to:
MATRIXX Software
Version No. 0.4

Authorized by Ian Williams
© 2009 Infosys Technologies Limited. Strictly private and confidential.
Whitepaper by Infosys on POC: MATRIXX Online Charging & Policy Management Engine Page 1 of 16
_____________________________________________________________________________________________
CONTENTS
1. ABSTRACT ...................................................................................................................................................... 3
2. EXECUTIVE SUMMARY ................................................................................................................................... 4
3. MATRIXX SOLUTION OVERVIEW .................................................................................................................... 6
4. POC METHODOLOGY ...................................................................................................................................... 8
5. POC RESULTS OVERVIEW................................................................................................................................ 9
5.1 POC TEST RESULTS..............................................................................................................................................9
6. CONCLUSION ................................................................................................................................................ 13
7. APPENDIX..................................................................................................................................................... 14
7.1 TABLE 1: LIST OF SCENARIOS TESTED IN POC. ..........................................................................................................14
7.2 TABLE 3: PRICE PLANS USED ..............................................................................................................................15
7.2.1 Price Plan 1 – Simple SMS Rating Scenario ..........................................................................................15
7.2.2 Price Plan 2 – Moderate GPRS Rating Scenario ...................................................................................15
7.2.3 Complex Price Plan 3 – Complex Voice Rating Scenario ......................................................................15
7.3 HARDWARE USED .............................................................................................................................................16
_____________________________________________________________________________________________
1. ABSTRACT
The business models for Telcos remain under unremitting pressure with the emergence of 21st Century
Business Drivers that increase pressure on margin, delivery and customer service.
We see three key challenges that need software driven solutions in a cost effective way.
 The explosion in the amount of mobile data traffic. Our customers are seeing year on year
growth in excess of 100% in the transactions carried on their networks.
 Bill-shock and policy management. Legislation changes and customer expectations mean that
it’s no longer acceptable to catch up with billable transactions at some point in the future.
 Telco 2.0 Business Models. Marketing departments must be able to monetize new services and
compete with new entrants
It’s not realistic to just throw greater and greater amounts of hardware at these problems, smart
solutions must be put in place.
This paper describes our evaluation of the Matrixx Software and its ability to resolve these issues.
_____________________________________________________________________________________________
2. EXECUTIVE SUMMARY
Today when we look for a Next-Generation Telecom billing solution, then the key attributes we are
looking are:
 Compliance to future technologies – Support for all industry standard protocols like RADIUS,
DIAMETER, IPDR, HTTP for collection, which enables support for future technologies like
WiMAX, 3G, CDMA 1.x,LTE etc.
 Real time support for pre-paid capabilities – Multiple session management, quota management
and balance management.
 Post-paid – pre-paid convergence – Management of post-paid and pre-paid accounts under the
same customer with balance transfer support.
With the number of quality telecom service providers increasing globally, acquiring new customers and
retaining the existing base is the biggest challenge for service providers. So the understanding of
customer usage patterns is the key for communication service providers in identifying the customer pain
points and possible areas of enhancements.
Statistics indicate that CSP’s may be losing an estimated 3% -11% of their revenue due to operation
leakages from network failure to create records, corrupt Call Detail Record data, delays in processing,
fraud, missing files, rating inaccuracy, collection problems, billing errors, prepay faults, interconnect
problems, software updates, provisioning errors and Debt/write-off.
Also with the advent of 3GPP, billing systems need to overcome the above problems as soon as possible.
MATRIXX OC/PM engine is one such solution which is 3GPP compliant and performs online charging,
account balance management, and rating and complies with the Diameter standard for authorization,
authentication, and accounting. This whitepaper is an attempt in analysing the proof of concept carried
out for this solution and provides the thorough analysis on the same. Various attributes for which the
Engine has been tested under the POC include CPU utilization, latency, throughput and performance
measured in terms of transactions per second.
_____________________________________________________________________________________________
This whitepaper documents our evaluation of the MATRIXX OC/PM Engine against these key
performance indicators and also measures it’s capability of supporting high volumes of prepaid and
postpaid usage.
We have carried out our evaluation across a number of business scenarios, testing the scalability of the
node based architecture of MATRIX OC/PM engine and it’s response to high volume of events for
various subscriber bases with increasing levels of pricing complexity.
The results we achieved are very exciting. We have been able to demonstrate real-time rating in excess
of 10,000 transactions per second, per blade, with linear scalability in terms of both rating complexity
and hardware utilisation.
_____________________________________________________________________________________________
3. MATRIXX SOLUTION OVERVIEW
MATRIXX OC/PM Engine is a 3GPP compliant modern online charging and policy management
system designed to support high volumes of prepaid and postpaid usage. Built on our patent-
pending Parallel-MATRIXX™ Technology, it combines extremely efficient transaction processing
with a highly flexible pricing, rating, and policy engine.
Key Functionality: MATRIXX OC/PM Engine encompasses the following functionality.

1. Real-time Rating and Charging: MATRIXX OC/PM Engine supports real-time
authorizations, re-authorizations, and session management, and can rate events both
online and offline. The prices defined in the pricing catalog are mapped to a multi-
dimensional array of algebraic formulas that are implemented at the system level and
isolated from the business logic, which makes processing extremely fast. The algebraic
equations enable MATRIXX OC/PM Engine to rate complex pricing structures and still
achieve ultra-high performance.
2. Pricing: The MATRIXX OC/PM Engine can handle complex charging and discounting
structures so service providers are not limited to basic pricing plans. IT personnel can
easily introduce new rating sequences, as frequently as needed, without requiring
updates to the core system to incorporate the changes. MATRIXX OC/PM Engine
provides an intuitive graphical user interface that allows you to easily create elaborate
charging and discounting models and reuse them across products and services. There is
no tradeoff between pricing complexity and performance, so more data can be
processed without reducing performance or decreasing efficiency. Pricing
administrators can use the templates to set up elaborate pricing structures and save the
configurations for reuse across product catalogs. This provides a set up once, reuse
anywhere approach that makes the MATRIXX Catalog Builder unique to other pricing
applications.
3. Subscriber and Balance Management: MATRIXX OC/PM Engine provides a sophisticated
set of balance management features so customers can share or allocate balances among
devices and subscribers. Integrated balance reservations ensure risk-free balance
sharing with zero exposure to revenue loss or leakage. You can set credit limits and
_____________________________________________________________________________________________
other thresholds on balances and trigger notifications to occur when a threshold is

crossed. For example, you can trigger a threshold notification to warn subscribers about
impending charges.
4. Policy Management: MATRIXX subscriber policy management enforces business rules
set up by service providers or subscribers to control access to services and balances.
System Highlights: There are several system highlights that set MATRIXX OC/PM Engine apart
from other online rating and charging systems.
1. Transaction Processing: The Parallel-MATRIXX transaction control architecture removes
the overhead involved in tracking data throughout the commit process (including
tracking any other processes that want to access that data). This allows it to rate
thousands of events concurrently while guaranteeing data integrity. The Parallel-
MATRIXX Clustering architecture allows identical copies of data to be distributed across
the MATRIXX OC/PM Engine and to be owned equally by each OC/PM blade in the blade
enclosure. Shared ownership of all data removes the chance of a single point of failure,
which is common in most distributed database management systems. MATRIXX OC/PM
Engine is comprised of several identical OC/PM blades. Each OC/PM blade is fully
contained on one blade server and is able to process events at full speed. The OC/PM
blade redundancy creates a highly available system that can handle an incredibly large
throughput without compromising performance. Adding more blades to MATRIXX
OC/PM Engine further increases the processing power.
2. High Availability: MATRIXX OC/PM Engine is comprised of several blade servers that are
identical in architecture and can process events independently. Each blade server
contains the same data set, so if one blade server goes offline, the other blade servers
take over processing for it. This guarantees high availability of MATRIXX OC/PM Engine.
3. Simple Configuration: You do not need to write complex code to configure MATRIXX
OC/PM Engine behavior and functionality. Instead, to configure MATRIXX OC/PM
Engine, you use XML specifications and a graphical user interface. This makes it
extremely easy to change the current configuration, such as configuring system-wide
parameters, network-to-MATRIXX data mapping, balance types, and pricing
components.
_____________________________________________________________________________________________
4. POC METHODOLOGY
Our Proof of Concept for MATRIXX Online Charging & Policy Management Engine attempts to validate
the behaviour of MATRIXX OC/PM engine for the following parameters:
 CPU Utilisation: This is defined as the percentage of available CPU processing cycles that are used
for any reason during the benchmark run. We were looking to ensure that the benchmark ran at
operational CPU loads (< 60%) to validate how realistic the results are.
 Latency: We measured the elapsed time from receipt of the diameter request message at the
MATRIXX diameter gateway and the transmission of the diameter response message by the
MATRIXX diameter gateway. This covers the entire processing of the event, including the charge
calculation, transactional balance updates, and full synchronous logging.
 Performance (Transactions/sec): We recorded the number of diameter charge request messages
that were fully processed and responded to per second averaged over the entire benchmark run.
Each test was carried out in real-time with synchronous logging of events and with full, ACID-compliant
transactions. We created a number of business scenarios whereby we used a two dimensional based
approach involving increasing pricing complexity and increasing numbers of subscribers. The scenarios
had different numbers of subscribers and rate plans of 1, 5 and 10 dimensions. Each scenario was run
with 1, 2 and 4 blades.
For each test, we pre-loaded all of the subscriber information, as we were not seeking to evaluate this
part of the system. Using a SEAGULL diameter call simulator, we prepared random samples of data for
each of the rating dimensions being tested and produced files containing the appropriate number of
events for each test.
Once the file had been prepared, we started the charging mechanism and logging and used the log files
to populate our test results.
_____________________________________________________________________________________________
5. POC RESULTS OVERVIEW
5.1 POC TEST RESULTS
5.1.1 LINEAR SCALABILITY OF MATRIXX OC/PM ENGINE
Figure 1 shows the graph depicting Linear Scalability of Matrixx OC/PM engine whereby for a
particular price plan (Complex Voice Plan), Performance and CPU utilization are measured by varying
the number of blades for various subscriber bases.
Key observations noted here are:

 Performance (events per second) is directly proportional to the number of blades used.
 Max CPU Utilization, which can also be taken as a measure of Peak Load goes up if we
increase number of blades keeping other parameters constant.
 Max CPU utilization is not increasing steeply and remains within our 60% threshold.
Figure 1. Linear Scalability
_____________________________________________________________________________________________
5.1.2 LATENCY VS. THROUGHPUT KEEPING OTHER PARAMETERS CONSTANT
Figure 2 shows the graph between Latency and Throughput variations keeping other parameters
constant. Following are the key observations during our POC:
 Latency decreases with increasing number of blades.
 Also follows the Industry standard whereby 98% of calls have latency of around 15 ms. So,
this shows that software is in compliance with existing standards.
Figure 2 Graph showing Latency vs Throughput
_____________________________________________________________________________________________
5.1.3 LATENCY VS. SUBSCRIBER BASE KEEPING OTHER PARAMETERS CONSTANT
Figure 3 shows the graph between Latency and Subscriber Base keeping other parameters
 Latency is proportional to subscriber base if number of blades is constant.
Figure 3 Graph showing Latency vs. Subscriber base
_____________________________________________________________________________________________
5.1.4 LATENCY VS. PRICING COMPLEXITY KEEPING OTHER PARAMETERS CONSTANT
Figure 4 shows the graph between Latency and Pricing complexity keeping other parameters
 There is very little change in the latency when there is increased complexity with the price
plans.
Figure 4 Graph showing Latency vs. Pricing Complexity
_____________________________________________________________________________________________
6. CONCLUSION
Our results were very much in line with our expectations, matching Matrixx’s predictions. The headline
result of 10,000 transactions per second, per blade, was achieved with all combinations of price plans
and numbers of subscribers.
This demonstration of linear scalability combined with high performance gives a new solution to the 21 st
Century challenges we and our customers have identified. Also a key driver of this Engine is about
maintaining latency at high loads as well.
_____________________________________________________________________________________________
7. APPENDIX
7.1 TABLE 1: SCENARIOS AND RESULTS IN POC.

100K Subs / 500K Events / Full Synchronous Logging
1 Blade
E-1 M-1 C-1
Elapsed time (sec) 47.718 Elapsed time (sec) 47.751 Elapsed time (sec) 47.753
Events / Sec = 10,478 Events / Sec = 10,471 Events / Sec = 10,470
Average CPU Util. = 19.15% Average CPU Util. = 22.92% Average CPU Util. = 26.84%
Max CPU Util. = 19.52% Max CPU Util. = 23.37% Max CPU Util. = 28.82%
2 Blades
E-1 E-2 E-Total
2 Blades
M-1 M-2 M-Total
2 Blades
C-1 C-2 C-Total
4 Blades
E-1 E-2 E-3 E-4 E-Total
Elapsed time (sec) 12.008 Elapsed time (sec) 12.009 Elapsed time (sec) 12.009 Elapsed time (sec) 12.009 Elapsed time (sec)
Events / Sec = 10,409 Events / Sec = 10,408 Events / Sec = 10,408 Events / Sec = 10,408 Events / Sec =
Average CPU Util. = 40.63% Average CPU Util. = 37.90% Average CPU Util. = 42.95% Average CPU Util. = 38.77% Average CPU Util. =
Max CPU Util. = 43.16% Max CPU Util. = 40.32% Max CPU Util. = 45.16% Max CPU Util. = 39.20% Max CPU Util. =
4 Blades
M-1 M-2 M-3 M-4 M-Total
4 Blades
C-1 C-2 C-3 C-4 C-Total
1M Subs / 5M Events / FSL
1 Blade
C-1
Elapsed time (sec) 476.322
Events / Sec = 10,497
Average CPU Util. = 22.54%
Max CPU Util. = 23.35%
1M Subs / 5M Events / Full Synchronous Logging
2 Blades
C-1 C-2 C-Total
_____________________________________________________________________________________________
7.2 PRICE PLANS USED
7.2.1 PRICE PLAN 1 – SIMPLE SMS RATING SCENARIO
This price plan charges subscribers based on the number of SMS messages consumed over the past month. The rate
is a simple per-message flat fee.
7.2.2 PRICE PLAN 2 – MODERATE GPRS RATING SCENARIO
This price plan charges subscribers for GPRS service. Subscribers prepay for a megabytes allowance and a roaming
megabytes allowance to which charges are applied. If they go over their allotment of megabytes, overage charges
apply.
The rates are based on the following 5 rating parameters.
 Roaming or not roaming. If roaming, charges are based on the country in which the usage occurs (Zone A,
B, C, D).
 Content type – email, text message, or general Internet usage.
 Device type – blackberry device or other smart phone.
 Prepaid data balance – if gone, overage charges apply.
 Prepaid roaming data balance – if gone, overage charges apply.
7.2.3 COMPLEX PRICE PLAN 3 – COMPLEX VOICE RATING SCENARIO
This price plan charges subscribers for Voice service based on the number of minutes consumed over the past
month.
The rates charge a different amount based on the following 10 rating parameter and the values that are valid at the
time of rating.
 Time-of-day – peak period, off-peak period, or weekend calling.
 Calling zone – local, long distance, or international calling to Asia, Latin America, or Europe.
 Monthly Usage Balance – if the balance is over the C$500 threshold, rates change.
 Carrier ID – on network or off-network.
 Friends and family – in calling circle or out of calling circle.
 Discounted minutes balance – if available, subtract from this balance and charge a different rate.
 Subscriber’s birthday – if it is a birthday, the subscriber is charged a different rate.
 Holiday Rates – if it is a holiday, the subscriber is charged a different rate.
 Roaming or not roaming rates.
 The SMS usage total – if the subscriber has sent over 50 SMS, the call is charged a different rate.
_____________________________________________________________________________________________
7.3 HARDWARE USED

HP
Qty Product Description

1 507019-B21 HP BLc7000 CTO 3 IN LCD ROHS Encl
4 507778-B21 HP BL460c G6 X5550 1P Svr
4 507793-B21 HP X5550 BL460c G6 FIO Kit
48 500658-B21 HP 4GB 2Rx4 PC3-10600R-9 Kit
8 507750-B21 HP 500GB 3G SATA 7.2K 2.5in MDL HDD
1 455880-B21 HP BLc VC Flex-10 Enet Module Opt
2 AT004A HP P4500 1.8TB SAS Storage System
1 J9145A HP ProCurve 2910al-24G Switch
Plot No. 44 & 97A,

Electronics City , Hosur Road,
Bangalore - 560 100
Phone: +91 80 28520261
Fax: +91 80 28520362

Proof of Concept by Infosys

Uploaded by

Document Information

Original Description:

Original Title

Copyright

Available Formats

Share this document

Share or Embed Document

Sharing Options

Did you find this document useful?

Is this content inappropriate?

Copyright:

Available Formats

Proof of Concept by Infosys

Uploaded by

Copyright:

Available Formats

Proof of Concept: MATRIXX Online Charging & Policy Management Engine

Proof of Concept: MATRIXX Online Charging & Policy Management Engine

Version No. 0.4

© 2009 Infosys Technologies Limited. Strictly private and confidential.

3. MATRIXX SOLUTION OVERVIEW

Key Functionality: MATRIXX OC/PM Engine encompasses the following functionality.

other thresholds on balances and trigger notifications to occur when a threshold is

5. POC RESULTS OVERVIEW

5.1 POC TEST RESULTS

5.1.1 LINEAR SCALABILITY OF MATRIXX OC/PM ENGINE

Key observations noted here are:

Figure 1. Linear Scalability

5.1.2 LATENCY VS. THROUGHPUT KEEPING OTHER PARAMETERS CONSTANT

Figure 2 Graph showing Latency vs Throughput

5.1.3 LATENCY VS. SUBSCRIBER BASE KEEPING OTHER PARAMETERS CONSTANT

Figure 3 Graph showing Latency vs. Subscriber base

5.1.4 LATENCY VS. PRICING COMPLEXITY KEEPING OTHER PARAMETERS CONSTANT

Figure 4 Graph showing Latency vs. Pricing Complexity

7.1 TABLE 1: SCENARIOS AND RESULTS IN POC.

7.2 PRICE PLANS USED

7.2.1 PRICE PLAN 1 – SIMPLE SMS RATING SCENARIO

7.2.2 PRICE PLAN 2 – MODERATE GPRS RATING SCENARIO

7.2.3 COMPLEX PRICE PLAN 3 – COMPLEX VOICE RATING SCENARIO

7.3 HARDWARE USED

Qty Product Description

Plot No. 44 & 97A,

You might also like