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Announcement - Agenda - Paper Presentations - Kickstart Sessions - Panel

Telecom Billing System is one of key systems among Telecom Operations Supporting Systems, which is mainly responsible for the collection of appropriate usage records, production of timely and accurate bills, and processing their payments. As sophisticated telecom services reflect on huge amount of billing related data, billing systems require high capability of real time response. In order to fulfill this real time requirement, for one thing, software providers could upgrade the priority of real time performance when designing the billing systems, for another, telecom carriers chiefly use UNIX operation systems, such as IBM AIX, on their high-performance servers to provide strong support for their real time services. Real-Time Linux, which acts as one of the best enhancements of Linux to make general Linux kernel appropriate for real time applications, is now widely considered as an alternative choice for academic research to implement efficient real time applications while minimizing the cost. Generally speaking, we investigate the feasibility of developing telecom billing systems based on Real-Time Linux. This paper is organized as follow: Firstly, we present the current market situation of telecom billing systems and what kind of challenge they are facing. Secondly, we describe generic problems for current billing systems when achieving the real-time functionality. Further more; regarding the features and application benefits of RTLinux, we discuss the feasibility of building up telecom billing systems using RTLinux. Finally, high-level architecture of the RTLinux-based billing system is briefly given.