Accounting management in heterogenous mobile access networks: the MIND approach

This paper presents a snapshot of the ongoing work in the IST project MIND regarding required accounting management in heterogeneous network environments for systems beyond 3G. MIND considers the billing issues in the context of vertical handover and more specifically in the context of handover between UMTS and WLAN networks through scenario-based examples. An idea is given how to approach accounting in heterogeneous permissive networking environment and what are the loose strands that still remain to be recognized and answered in research as well as in standardization.