Billing process - agent networks

Wireless prepaid services aim to serve the population with low income and high credit risk individuals. This prevents subscriber from overusing a service than his projected budget and finally landing into financial troubles. In the wireless prepaid billing system, the network needs to constantly monitor a database for checking and updating the current balance of the caller and receiver (in case of roaming etc.). This requires resources to be available and working in real time, usually running on expensive and fast memory. Moreover, this centralized behavior also imposes scalability issues by limiting the total number of users that can be served in a given time. Finally, to avoid having "single point of failure", complex failover handling systems are needed. Thus, a system is needed to perform this prepaid billing operation in a distributed manner so that the throughput and reliability of the system may be enhanced. In this invention we propose a decentralized system for prepaid billing using Mobile Agents (MAs). Moreover, a concept of light-weight and dynamic MAs is introduced in order to increase the security and flexibility of the system.