RADIUS Billing Development & OSS Integration

The Client

Golden Telecom is the largest independent facilities-based provider of integrated telecommunications and internet services to businesses and other high-usage customers and telecommunications operators in Russia and CIS.

The Scope

To develop RADIUS Accounting and Provisioning System integrated with existent Service Provisioning System to ease management of user’s accounts on RADIUS servers, collect accounting information, and monitor subscriber sessions.

The solution

Remote Authentication Dial-In User Service aka RADIUS servers enable remote access servers to communicate with a central server to authenticate dial-in users and authorize their access to the requested system or service of provider.

RADIUS Accounting and Provisioning System is a component of OSS and dedicated to automate the cycle of management and monitoring of all RADIUS servers of Beeline. Also, it serves the purpose of collection all available accounting information and usage statistics which then is exported to billing system for further processing. RAPS helps customer’s support and technical staff to maintain and manage user’s accounts on all set of services including Dial-up, ISDN, ADSL and GPRS. It helps to maintain listed operations not only in the central facilities, but in the regions as well.

The Challenge

Different parts of the customer’s OSS were physically located in different places, so the simultaneous usage of the system’s parts, as well as keeping the entire system functional while changing the parts was quite a challenging point. Moreover, though we had to work with the system, we didn’t have an access to the customer’s security system, which means we had to work with models and emulators.

The Outcome

Our team developed an intelligent RADIUS Accounting and Provisioning System, which helps to ease the work of support staff, collect detailed accounting information for further export into the billing system, and minimize the errors. The developed OSS-module was successfully integrated into the existing telecom provider infrastructure and linked with its central security system. This allowed each administrator to have his own access rights configured and set by supervisor and to configure interfaces in a way that each low-level administrator can access only specific set of functions and can manage only his/her accounts and services.

History of operations and transactions log modules was developed for customer’s OSS as well. Those modules allow simplifying the investigation of possible problems and moot points.

Several important interfaces were developed in the scope of the RAPS project. Among them are interface for integration with billing system, interface for integration with company security system, and interface for integration with the network descriptions subsystem. All of them allow quickly configure and maintain provided services, automatically requesting and maintaining RADIUS server permissions and functionality.