Credit allocation for UMTS prepaid service

Abstract

Prepaid phone service requires a user to make payment before calling. In 2.5G or the 3G networks, a user may be engaged in multiple voice and/or data prepaid sessions at the same time. For such services, it is important to distribute appropriate amounts of prepaid credit units to simultaneously executed sessions of a user. By considering the universal mobile telecommunication system (UNITS) as an example, this paper studies the prepaid credit allocation for the prepaid sessions. To simulataneously accommodate more prepaid sessions for a user, we propose a credit reclaim mechanism called prepaid credit reclaim (PCR). Analysis and simulation experiments are conducted to investigate the performance of our mechanism. Our study indicates that PCR can significantly improve the-performance of the prepaid mechanism.