Background

Charging data records or CDRs are generated every time you use the internet on your phone. These records are created by multiple cellular network elements and contain the metadata related to your network activity and determine how you will be billed for your access.

A separate piece of equipment is used to combine matching records from different equipment into a final billable record. This hardware or software device is called a charging gateway function (CGF).

At Atlantic Tele-Network we have created our own CGF using Java to parse the incoming files, load them into a database for matching, and generate the output. Once a complete set of matching records are found, a new record is created in the format required for billing.

Keyway

Periodically the database needs to be cleaned up and old information needs to be purged, but it’s important that maintenance does not run...