Diameter Applications
01 January 2019
This chapter discusses some widely used Diameter applications. Application messages are exchanged between Diameter nodes only after capabilities have been discovered. The chapter begins with the application defined by the base specification, Base Accounting, then looks at another accounting application defined by the IETF called Credit-Control. In addition to consumption monitoring, the Diameter Credit-Control application supports service price enquiry, user's balance check, and refund of credit on the user's account. The chapter also looks at an authorization application to specify quality of service, and covers the authentication application, Diameter Extensible Authentication Protocol. The Diameter application that handles mobility management is called the S6a interface and is part of the Evolved Packet Core, the all-packet network specified by 3GPP and introduced in Release 8. The S6a interface supports many features and is extensible. To preserve backwardsâcompatibility, any new functionality should be defined as optional.