Oracle Scales Up Converged Charging to Serve 100 Million Subscribers

Multi-site deployment validates geographical scale and real-time charging efficiency of Oracle Cloud Scale Charging on OCI

With nearly 200 commercial 5G deployments, communications service providers (CSPs) will need to monetize new offers ranging from cloud gaming to smart construction and IoT. The success of these new use cases and their underlying business models will hinge on efficiently scaling charging operations to support tens or even hundreds of millions of subscribers.

To ensure CSPs can meet these demands, Oracle recently put its Cloud Scale Charging to the test. Running on Oracle Cloud Infrastructure (OCI) using Oracle Container Engine for Kubernetes (OKE), the solution achieved single-digit millisecond latency in a multi-site performance test scaled to support 100 million concurrently active subscribers. Achieving 270,000 transactions per second, the test showed that Oracle’s cloud native solutions can meet even the most strenuous charging requirements of the world’s largest CSPs. 

“CSPs will need to charge for 5G services in real-time using hyperscale performance, scalability, and availability,” said John Abraham, principal analyst, Analysys Mason. “Cloud native architectures will also be essential to helping CSPs reduce cost and improve time to cash across the revenue lifecycle. Oracle’s performance test results show Cloud Scale Charging is equipped to meet these stringent performance requirements.”

Cloud Scale Charging is an online and offline charging solution within Oracle’s Cloud Scale Monetization portfolio. A rebranding of Oracle Communications Billing and Revenue Management (BRM) and affiliated products, Oracle’s Cloud Scale Monetization portfolio of charging, billing, and revenue management solutions, including Cloud Scale Charging, Cloud Scale Billing, and Cloud Scale Charging and Billing, enables CSPs to support any service, payment, or business model across 2G-5G mobile networks.

“The results show that with Oracle’s Cloud Scale Charging, CSPs don’t have to limit innovation. The solution’s rating and balance management capabilities are unhindered by the complexity of the pricing model or account structure and enable CSPs to maintain scalability and business continuity without compromising performance,” said Jason Rutherford, senior vice president and general manager, Oracle Communications, Applications. “Oracle’s Cloud Scale Monetization portfolio brings together the company’s deep expertise in the communications industry with a breadth of capabilities for developing high-performance cloud native solutions.”

Sustained performance in a multi-site deployment

The performance test setup included deployment of the cloud-agnostic Cloud Scale Charging solution on OCI. The OCI environment provides unmatched price-to-performance ratios, the ease of deploying with OKE, and industry-leading security which is critical for meeting the demands of telco workloads. Industry-realistic traffic patterns and charging scenarios were used for the test, including an account mix of 90% prepaid and 10% postpaid for the 100 million accounts provisioned.

To demonstrate the power of Cloud Scale Charging’s in-memory charging grid with bi-directional data federation powered by Oracle Coherence, traffic was distributed and charging updates federated across two of Oracle Cloud’s 36 regions – Phoenix in the western U.S. and Ashburn on the East Coast of the U.S. Performance results measured over 270,000 transactions per second across the two sites, encompassing voice, messaging, data charging traffic along with inbound balance queries, and outbound notifications. In addition, single-digit millisecond latency was observed across all charging traffic types and 20,700 rated events per second were generated at each site for consumption in downstream systems (e.g., billing or customer engagement systems).

The test also reaffirmed the efficacy of Cloud Scale Charging’s cloud native architecture, with efficient resource utilization observed for application and database CPU and memory at each site in a single and multi-site test. Meeting the performance requirements of 5G is a key driver of CSP investment in a new converged charging system, according to a recent Oracle survey.

Source: Oracle media announcement