A Scalable Billing Architecture for Future Wireless Mesh Backhauls

The backhaul network, which connects base stations to the radio network controllers, poses a major challenge in cellular networks today due to the expensive maintenance, operation and poor scalability in response to traffic dynamicity. The majority of the present backhaul networks is composed of either leased lines, i.e., T1/E1 and/or microwave links. Recently, wireless mesh networks have been proposed as a possible backhaul transport media, not only for their significant cost savings but also for their scale, flexibility and resilience. At the same time, however, wireless mesh backhauls pose many technical challenges including timing synchronization for GSM networks, bandwidth reservation techniques, dynamic bandwidth control, and billing. To address some of these challenges, we propose the first ever billing architecture for wireless mesh networks and analyze its performance and scalability in response to a novel, threshold based bandwidth management algorithm. Using analysis based on a simple Markov process, we evaluate a highly unstable reservation mechanism and establish the corresponding upper bounds on the billing signaling performance over mesh backhauls. The analysis and simulation results show that our billing scheme scales well even for poor implementations of bandwidth reservations.