The application of Sybase database in Sichuan GPRS system

I. BACKGROUND

With the rapid development of communications technology, our business activities cover new content, put forward new requirements, mobile communication technology began to approach business. And now the mobile communication system is also undergoing great changes, the application of a wide range of GSM communication network is to the third generation of mobile communication system, and GPRS is its necessary transition stage. As a result, many current telecom operators are beginning to evolve to new technologies to fully grasp the future of unlimited business opportunities. However, the evolution of technology will involve many problems, such as infrastructure construction, application system renewal and service follow-up. In view of this trend, many of the solution providers working in this area are also working to develop highly targeted technologies to help telecom operators achieve a smooth evolution. As an industry renowned independent software developer and e-business infrastructure solution Provider, Sybase has taken the lead in incorporating features that fit the needs of the times and trend evolution in its products, helping current telecom operators to address the challenges of system evolution and thus drive them forward. Recently, Sichuan Mobile Communications Corporation in its latest GPRS billing system using Sybase's database solution, successfully solved the new business billing problem, at the same time the system is the first GPRS billing system.

Second, demand

Sichuan Mobile GSM900 Network began construction in 96, has been built to a pair of TMSC1, a pair of two-level Exchange Bureau TMSC2, a pair of signaling interchange STP as the upper network of mobile communication network. As of January 2001, Sichuan Mobile communications network, including the province's 21 local mobile service network, exchange capacity 4.27 million, end of 33, base station 3,564, a total of 21,225 carrier.

The construction of GPRS business Operation support System in Sichuan Province aims to provide a high performance billing and settlement system with advanced, open, standard, scalability, manageability and security for the upcoming construction of GPRS service system. After the construction is completed and put into operation, the system will support 50,000 mobile data users GPRS billing and settlement system, and through GPRS billing gateway to provide billing data collection.

Third, the implementation

(i) Configuration programme principles
(1) The use of client/server (c/s) system of two-tier structure and browser/web server/database server (B/W/D) system of multi-layer structure combined
(2) Database selection, positioning and opening, interconnection extensibility Reliability Security (3) development tool selection Development efficient universality open extensibility

(ii) System composition

The GPRS business operation support system of Sichuan province is composed of a GPRS billing center and a Chengdu GPRS charging collection point.

As Sichuan mobile network construction is relatively perfect, in addition to the GPRS business may be relatively small in the short term, GPRS billing system as a provincial billing and settlement center of a relatively independent subsystem will share the existing GSM billing and settlement system LAN and coverage of the province's computer wide area network, and through it to connect the provincial GPRS network Billing Gateway (CG), at the same time to connect the provincial Billing and settlement Center GSM billing and settlement system, the city of the management of the tent management system, the relevant administrative departments, as well as billing and settlement center group.

The interaction of GPRS billing and settlement system with the roaming data of the billing and Settlement center of the group company will still be connected with the communication server of the existing GSM billing and settlement system. In order to ensure the reliability of billing and settlement system, the software host platform uses highly available software (dual-computer backup software) to form a highly available cluster system. Once the application of a host or host has failed, the application will automatically switch to another host, thus ensuring the high availability of GPRS billing Service application.

The components of the subsystem are:

1. Data acquisition System

The data acquisition system should include two parts, the original word collection between GSN and CGF, and the CGF message collection between CGF and BS. The acquisition system can support the following collection methods
· Online acquisition (quasi-real-time collection): The collection system and the main, standby CG and application server directly connected, regular query CG whether there is a new original file generation, whenever the new original billing data file, will read its original billing data file through the relevant protocol, and transfer the file to the province GPRS Billing Settlement Center.
· Offline Acquisition: Ability to read CGF billing data files from the tape or optical media provided by CG.
· Real-time acquisition: It can collect the original billing data in real time from the real-time collection port provided by CG and realize the real-time billing.

The interface of data acquisition system conforms to industry standard, the billing gateway and application Server support the acquisition protocol conforming to industry standard, such as Ftam or TCP/IP.

2. Speech single preprocessing system

The preprocessing system deals with the collected CGF speech documents and the provincial visiting roaming documents issued by the GPRS billing and settlement system of the group company. It includes the format conversion of the single file, the check and error of the single file, and the verification and analysis processing.

3. Billing system for batch Price

Billing processing has a strong normative and flexible, to achieve the parameters of the billing standard, that is, the source code can not modify the program to adapt to the various changes in billing policy. The batch price billing system mainly carries on the corresponding processing to the standard pretreatment speech list, according to the billing rule carries on each expense computation, forms the standard batch price speech list, and the standard batch price speech list stores in the database, mainly includes the following function:

· Online data batch price (including hot batch price billing processing)
· Test Grant Price (Specify the data file to be approved in a separate statement)
· The wrong single batch price (the data in the wrong table is re-approved)
· Re-approval price (re-approval of the approved price data)
· Receipt and supplementary billing of visiting and roaming message list
· Data integrity Detection
· Batch price Data warehousing

The error detection of billing data refers to the inspection and processing of the accuracy, completeness and validity of the data in the process of billing. Its function is to provide the system with automatic perfect testing function, reasonable data checking method, ensure the correctness of the billing data, integrality and the correctness of the interface data, the contents of detection include:

· Data integrity Detection
· Data correctness detection
· Billing correctness Check
· The accuracy of various interface data files

At the same time, the billing Center also summarizes the daily, monthly, quarterly anomaly billing data, including the types of new errors that occur.

4. Data transmission System

The data transmission system is responsible for exchanging information with the Billing Business Center, the city Accounts Center and other relevant units of the group, and sending the message to the corresponding processing center according to the type of the order.

5. Settlement Management System

To conduct international and provincial travel and settlement processing according to the data of the telephone list. Includes the following sections of functionality:
· Inter-provincial roaming settlement · International Roaming settlement · Settlement Results Statistics

6. Query system

Billing system supports a variety of query methods, the contents of the query includes the query, settlement query, statistical results query, high query and other kinds of information inquiries. At the same time, query system also has query authority, according to different query permissions, provide different query services.

7. Statistical analysis System

The statistical analysis system can carry on the detailed classification statistics to each kind of business, the speech single file, the traffic volume, high and so on, produces the corresponding report.

8. High processing system

High level is divided into accumulated high, real-time high, the system can regularly check out the province, provincial/international visitors roaming high users, and generate the corresponding high report, with statistical function.

(iii) System functions

1. Data acquisition. Data acquisition ensures real-time and accuracy. In view of the high demand of GPRS billing for real time, the system can achieve high-speed data acquisition. In particular, data collection from the CG interval: busy time of not more than 15 minutes, not busy when the maximum is not more than 4 hours. For some real-time requirements of the business, the system can be collected from the CG real-time data. Moreover, the system can be in the collection process of real-time monitoring, in order to find out the CG or the collection machine fault, and generate a hint or alarm information.
2. Data processing. Data processing includes two parts: (1), Local data: from the local CG collection obtained from the original message data. (2), settlement data: By the group of GPRS Billing Center issued by the provincial/international travel to visit the list.
In order to ensure the data processing requirements of busy time, the system completes the billing processing of the dialog sheet (including format conversion, inspection, the statement of the merger, error correction, warehousing, find heavy orders, separate check, the speed can achieve the following objectives: (1), local orders: From the statement appears in the billing interface to complete billing processing (including acquisition, pretreatment, Price, storage , sub-inspection), no more than 15 minutes, (2), roaming visits to the list: from the word list in the provincial center of the communication server to complete the processing of data (including the check, storage, separate inspection), not more than 15 minutes.
3, System Management (1) system has good interactivity, all management interface are in English and Chinese, Operation Concise, and provide rich online help information. (2) The system provides a variety of access means to allow administrators to manage the system in different environments. (3) The system provides complete monitoring and scheduling tools, with complete monitoring, fault detection and alarm, fault handling functions. (4) As far as possible, the host, network, database, application systems, as well as third-party products to centralize the management of a single monitoring and management platform. (5) The system management has a high degree of automation.

(iv) Sybase products in the system

Sichuan GPRS Business Operation support System This phase project mainly constructs the GPRS Province Billing Center and the Chengdu GPRS collection point, the Sybase product configuration plan function characteristic:
(1) reliability. According to the technical requirements of Sichuan Mobile communication GPRS billing system, the GPRS Billing Center database Server Enterprise Adaptive Server has two-machine hot-standby structure. High-availability software (dual-computer backup software) is used to form a highly available cluster system. Once the application in a host or host fails, the application will automatically switch to another host, thereby

Ensure the reliability of the whole system by ensuring the high availability of GPRS billing Service application. In the GPRS billing Center equipped with replication server replication server, on the HA for data to add a layer of protection, to achieve data hot backup, off-site backup, to achieve disaster-tolerant purposes. Backup server implements a cold backup of the data and backs up the data to the offline magnetic media.
(2) scalability. The whole system adopts mature client/server (c/s) architecture and browser/web server/database server (B/W/S) architecture, the whole system is advanced and adaptable. To meet the needs of the future changes in order to protect the Sichuan Province mobile communications company now and the existing investment, fully consider the system scalability.
(3) Advanced. The use of a variety of advanced technology means, including Internet Information management technology, functional application Server, open heterogeneous database interconnection interface. EA Server provides a page and component based application development platform that supports the current mainstream component standards (CORBA, COM, EJB, etc.).
(4) Manageability. The database can be effectively managed and monitored through Sybase and SQL Monitor to ensure the system running properly.
(5) security. Good security and confidentiality performance, in Sybase solution not only in the database has multi-level security mechanism, conforms to the NCSC definition C2 level security standard, can effectively guarantee the data security, moreover in the network transmission process is based on the network transmission low-level protocol above also has many kinds of encryption mechanism.
(6) High performance. In view of the large amount of information and the complexity of its structure, the performance requirements of database and open tools are very high, and Sybase's products can meet this requirement better. And Sybase's development tools are fully available. These product configurations fully demonstrate the excellent performance of Sybase products in terms of the following basic business requirements:
1 data collection: Sybase openclient is a standard interface for accessing Sybase servers, a call-level interface (API), with multi-platform, multilingual (3gl,c, COBOL, and so on) support capabilities that are much more efficient and flexible than traditional embedded SQL (e_ SQL), ODBC and so on, and the platform is fully consistent, so that the application has a good portability.
2 Database design and access: Sybase offers a wide range of tools, especially from the bottom of the 3GL development Language Watcom series (the industry's fastest compilation technology) to the highest level of PowerBuilder, POWERJ and other application development environments. Moreover, Sybase's tools can support a variety of data sources directly without the need for other products.
3 Data management: Sybase Adaptive Server Enterprise is a highly performance database server product in many RDBMS today, enabling users to achieve a better performance/price ratio for their systems.
4 Powerful Application Server: Sybase's application Server EA Server provides an open, High-performance platform for browser-based/web server architecture applications. EA Server supports the current mainstream Web servers (ISAPI, NSAPI, and standard CGI) and the mainstream component standards (CORBA, COM, EJB, and so on), providing a guarantee for future scalability and maintainability of the application system.
5 Custom Server: Sybase is the only database vendor that provides an open server-side programming interface, which provides the possibility for users to write custom-enabled servers using standard Openclient/openserver protocols and to transparently access the Sybase environment.

Iv. Assessment

In the specific implementation process, the system provides excellent performance, in the following areas have achieved good results:

Security: Ensure data is not corrupted and stolen by illegal intrusion, and ensure data consistency.
Reliability/Stability: The use of fault detection, alarm and screening mechanisms to ensure that the data are not lost or damaged by unexpected circumstances: the use of flexible task scheduling mechanism to achieve load balancing, and to prevent the "bottleneck" generated, in any case, to maintain predictable output.
Scalability/Scalability: The modular design principle allows users to choose the components they need to form different scale applications, while new features and new business additions can be implemented without impacting the original system.
Easy to operate, easy to manage: The system provides a good user interface, complete help information, so that the maintenance of system parameters and management can be fully achieved through the Operation interface.
Real-time: The real-time completion of large-capacity data processing, real-time requirements for a higher business provides a special processing method.
After helping Sichuan mobile to carry out the billing management of GPRS project, the system also has sufficient scalability, and can realize the easy upgrade with the continuous technology, so as to meet the future business needs.