Systems, computing devices, and methods for setting data usage levels among computing devices based on predicted data usage are disclosed. According to an aspect, a method includes predicting data usage by a computing device. The computing device is associated with a data usage plan including the computing device and at least one other computing device. The method also includes setting a data usage level of the at least one other computing device based on the predicted data usage.

A radio communication network includes: a control plane (C-plane) node (24) located in a core network (20); a local gateway (14) located in a Radio Access Network (RAN) (10) including a base station (11). The C-plane node (24) has a C-plane of a PDN gateway and provides a first C-plane interface for communicating with a PCC entity relating to Policy and Charging Control (PCC). The local gateway (14) has a user plane of a PDN gateway and provides IP connectivity to the base station (11) to offload a particular type of traffic. The local gateway (14) further provides a second control plane interface for communicating with the C-plane node (24).

This specification presents methods and apparatus in a user equipment, packet data gateway, online charging server and policy server for enabling a user equipment with a prepaid subscription to select an application to download and obtain its downloadable size and reserve charging credits and resources at the network prior to downloading the application in accordance with the downloadable size thus allowing the prepaid user to secure the successful entire download of the application without running the risk of depleting the prepaid account while downloading.

Embodiments of this application disclose a charging management method, a user plane function entity, and a control plane function entity. The method includes: receiving, by a UP, a first usage reporting rule (URR) and a second URR sent by a CP, where the first URR is correlated with the second URR; when usage information on the UP reaches a threshold of the first URR, obtaining, by the UP, usage information corresponding to the first URR and usage information corresponding to a third URR correlated with the first URR; and sending, by the UP to the CP, the usage information corresponding to the first URR and the usage information corresponding to the third URR, so that the CP generates a charging data record based on the usage information corresponding to the first URR and the usage information corresponding to the third URR.

Device assisted CDR creation, aggregation, mediation and billing is provided. In some embodiments, device assisted CDR creation, aggregation, mediation and billing for a wireless network includes collecting device generated service usage information for one or more devices in wireless communication on the wireless network; and providing the device generated service usage information in a syntax (e.g., a device assisted charging data record (CDR)) and a communication protocol (e.g., 3GPP, 3GPP2, or other communication protocols) that can be used by other network devices to augment or replace network generated service usage information for the one or more devices in wireless communication on the wireless network.

A modified end user network access point includes a switching module and a controller to track usage of the end user network access point by wirelessly connected end user devices. The tracked usage information is transmitted from the end user network access point to a remotely coupled data center. The data center collects usage information from a plurality of different end user network access points. The collected usage information is in turn transmitted from the data center to a network carrier. The network carrier uses the received usage information to bill users for accessing the end user network access points and using any services provided by the end user network access points. An owner of each end user network access point is compensated by the network carrier each instance that an end user device utilizes the end user network access point to access the network carrier's communications network.

A method is disclosed for blocking a cloned mobile device by a processor of a network. The processor receives a first registration from a first mobile device at a first location. The first registration includes a device identifier and a phone number. The processor then confirms that a second registration from a second mobile device at a second location includes the device identifier and the phone number and calculates a first fraud score for the first mobile device and a second fraud score for the second mobile device. The processor then determines that the second mobile device is the cloned mobile device, when the second fraud score exceeds the first score, and blocks the cloned mobile device from registering on the network.

A method of interpreting an authorization token is described herein. The service can receive an authorization token from a client device, and validate a signature of the authorization token. The service can identify an allowed function value associated at least part of an entitlement representation contained in a body of the authorization token. The service can convert the allowed function value to an allowed function bitmask that includes bits at a plurality of bit positions that are set to values indicating whether the subscriber element has attributes associated with each of the plurality of bit positions on a predefined attribute list. The service can determine whether the allowed function bitmask indicates that the subscriber element has one or more qualifying attributes that entitle a user of the client device to access the service.

A method includes reading signaling messages as they arrive in a Radio Access Network (RAN) parser; for each signaling message, assigning the signaling message to a procedure, decoding the signaling message to obtain information required to generate a Call Data Record (CDR), and obtaining information on status of the procedure associated with the signaling message; and based on the status of the procedure, one of (1) waiting on more signaling messages for the procedure and (2) determining the procedure has ended and generating the CDR based on the associated signaling messages.

Embodiments of the present invention provide a gateway system and a communication method. The gateway system includes: a control plane entity, connected or integrated with a mobility management network element, and configured to allocate an IP address to UE and configure a data path for connecting a user plane entity with an RAN, a PDN or another gateway; one or more user plane entities, located between the PDN and the RAN, independent of the control plane entity, configured to forward data on the data path configured by the control plane entity. The gateway system is composed of the control plane entity and the user plane entity which are independent of each other, the number of the user plane entities may be independently changed to adapt to the change of network traffic without replacing all gateway entities, the network deployment is more convenient and the cost is lower.