Performance of hot billing mobile prepaid service

Prepaid service has become an important mobile application with rapid growth for subscription rate in the recent years. Implementation of prepaid service may generate large network traffic that significantly affects the performance of a mobile network. This paper studies the hot billing solution for prepaid service. We investigate how the amount of prepaid credit and the Frequency of call detail record (CDR) transmissions affect network signaling and potential bad debt that a service provider may bear. Our study suggests that a prepaid service provider should encourage customers to buy large prepaid credits by giving them discounts. Furthermore. based on call traffic, an optimal CDR transmission frequency can be found by using our modeling technique. (C) 2001 Elsevier Science B.V. All rights reserved.