FAQ on OCS
- Vance Shipley
Answers to frequently asked questions about SigScale OCS.
Can customers share account balances?
Yes, balance buckets are associated with a subscription and many users may share a subscription.
Are international calls rated by country?
Tariff tables may be managed with prefixes and corresponding rates. Country codes may be used to rate by country or more specific matches may be done.
What about fault tolerance and redundancy?
SigScale OCS is a fully distributed application run on a cluster of nodes. A production system should have at least two nodes but we usually recommend at least three where two have DIAMETER peers and one dedicated to REST interfaces. Clusters may scale out with many nodes. All transactions are atomic across the cluster.
How about Policy and Charging Control (PCC)?
The functionality of a PCRF is included in SigScale OCS. The DIAMETER Gx application interface is provided for PCEF integration. Policy rule management is fully integrated with the Product Catalog and may be managed using our progressive web app (PWA) front end.
Is 3GPP AAA Server supported?
Yes, the SigScale OCS product supports the DIAMETER SWm, STa, S6b and SWx application interfaces for AAA and the EAP-AKA/AKA' methods for USIM authentication either with locally stored credentials (K/OPc) or SWx interface to an HSS.
Which TM Forum Open APIs are supported?
SigScale OCS was designed from the ground up with the TM Forum information model (SID) and uses all TM Forum Open APIs. For the last word on what is and isn’t supported see the OAS (“swagger”) files provided in each release.
API Number | API Name |
|---|---|
TMF620 | Product Catalog Management |
TMF637 | Product Inventory Management |
TMF633 | Service Catalog Management |
TMF638 | Service Inventory Management |
TMF634 | Resource Catalog Management |
TMF639 | Resource Inventory Management |
TMF654 | Prepay Balance Management |
TMF635 | Usage Management |
TMF632 | Party Management |
What are Offerings, Products, Services and Buckets?
An Offering describes what you are offering to customers, including the commercial terms. A Product is a subscription to an Offering. A Service describes a user (e.g. IMSI) of the Product. You may have many Services (users) for a single Product (subscription). The diagram below shows the tables and relationships.
Note that a Service may only be associated to a single Product. Composite Offerings are used to combine voice, data and messaging Offerings.
A Balance Bucket holds an amount of available credit and is associate with a Product which may have many Buckets of different amounts, validity periods and types (cents, bytes, seconds, messages).