6.9 Policy decisions based on spending limits

23.2033GPPPolicy and charging control architectureRelease 17TS

Policy decisions based on spending limits is a function that allows PCRF taking actions related to the status of policy counters that are maintained in the OCS.

The identifiers of the policy counters that are relevant for a policy decision in the PCRF may be stored in the PCRF or possibly in SPR. The PCRF is configured with the actions associated with the policy counter status that is received from OCS.

The PCRF may request the status of policy counters in the OCS using the Initial or Intermediate Spending Limit Report Request Procedure. The OCS provides the current status of the requested policy counters to the PCRF. The OCS may in addition provide one or more pending statuses for a requested policy counter together with the time they have to be applied. The PCRF shall immediately apply the current status of a policy counter. A pending status of a policy counter shall autonomously become the current status of a policy counter at the PCRF when the indicated corresponding time is reached. Subsequently provided information for pending statuses of a policy counter shall overwrite the previously received information.

The PCRF may subscribe to spending limit reporting for policy counters from the OCS using the Initial or Intermediate Spending Limit Report Request procedure. If spending limit reporting for a policy counter is enabled, the OCS shall notify the PCRF of changes in the status of this policy counter (e.g. daily spending limit of $2 reached) and optionally pending statuses of this policy counter together with their activation time (e.g. due to a billing period that will expire at midnight). The PCRF may cancel spending limit reporting for specific policy counter(s) using the Intermediate Spending Limit Report Request procedure, or for all policy counter(s) using the Final Spending Limit Report Request procedure.

The PCRF uses the status of each relevant policy counter, and optional pending policy counter statuses if known, as input to its policy decision to apply operator defined actions, e.g. change the QoS (e.g. downgrade APN-AMBR), modify the PCC/QoS/ADC Rules to apply gating or change charging conditions.

NOTE: The relationship between a policy counter identifier and the Charging Key could be 1-1. However it could also be assumed that services that share the same Charging Key can be associated with different policy counters i.e. although they are rated in the same way they are subject to different actions regarding (e.g. QoS and gating) and are therefore counted separately. Likewise services that share the same policy counters can be associated with different Charging Key.