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Cisco Media Gateway Controller Software Release 9 Billing Interface Guide
OL-1089-11
Chapter 1 Billing Interfaces
Billing Capabilities Overview
RADIUS Interface
The RADIUS Enhancement for Accounting feature provides RADIUS interface support on the PGW
2200 for CDR data. For more information about the feature, including new CDRs, refer to the RADIUS
Enhancement for Accounting feature guide.
Message Interface
The CDB message interface is a one-way interface to the CDR dumper. The following paragraphs
describe the CDR message format for messages sent to the CDR dumper. The CDR dumper saves the
CDB message into the CDR files without any conversion or data manipulation.
CDBs are written to disk in a binary, tag-length-value (TLV) format. Many mediation systems depend
on input data that is preformatted in an ASCII format. An optional BAMS converts the MGC CDR billing
output files to ASCII.
The accuracy selection for timepoints is configurable on the MGC as seconds or milliseconds. In order
for the ASCII representation of timepoints to be properly displayed, a place holder for each type has been
provided in the ASCII output layout. For each timepoint type, two entries are contained in the output
format, one entry for seconds granularity and another entry for milliseconds granularity.
A downstream mediation or billing system (for example, BAMS) can easily parse these ASCII records.
Each record is prefixed in the ASCII file with a record identifier field, for example a 1110 record would
begin as follows: 1110,1234,5678,2222,...
The ASCII files are named with the same prefix name specified (refer to page 1-20 for a prefix example),
and postfixed with “.csv” rather than “.bin”. Each file resides in the /opt/CiscoMGC/var/bam directory.
Note It is the system operator's responsibility to manage files created by the MGC billing process, including
archiving and deleting files from the system.
CDB Message Format
The format of CDB messages being sent to the CDR dumper is based on tag, length, and value (TLV).
Each field within the CDB message has a tag, length, and value.
Figure 1-1 shows how the CDB record itself is also in TLV format with the value part composed of
multiple sub-TLVs. For performance reasons the first few fields(tags) of the value portion of the CDB
exists in a fixed order for every message. These fields are the Unique Call ID (tag 5000), CDB Version
(tag 4000), and CDB Timepoint (tag 4001).
Note These three fields are fixed so that the CDR dumper can have direct access to these fields without having
to parse or search through all the CDB message TLV fields.
As shown in Figure 1-1, the first tag in the CDB record identifies the CDB message type. The length
indicates the length of the entire message, excluding 4 bytes (2 bytes for the message tag and 2 bytes for
the length).