Flexible Charging for Multi-provider Composed Services using a Federated, Two-phase Rating Process

We present a framework enabling charging for composed services comprised of services offered by multiple providers. In the framework rating engines may generate charge information for individual services and provide this information upon request to other rating engines when these services are used as part of a composed service. Rating engines additionally employ a two-phase rating process which allows potentially complex business agreements between providers to be reflected in composed service charges. Charges can vary depending on the context in which a service is executed, for example, as part of a composed service which includes services offered by a partner provider. Crucially, the process allows rating engines to calculate these varying charges without having to be manually pre-configured with details of the structure of individual composed services. In the paper we provide an overview of the framework, specifying in detail the rating process and inter-rating engine communications, and describe via an example its deployment in a distributed environment supporting the execution of composed services