I got an email the other day asking a simple question:

How do I know if a subscriber is VoLTE roaming or not when they send an SMS to charge for it?

My immediate reaction was to look at the SIP headers, P-Access-Network-Info will tell you where the subscriber is located, end of.

Right?

Well not quite, this will tell the SMSc the location of the subscriber sending the SMS. If the PLMN in the P-Access-Network-Info != the home PLMN, the sub is roaming.

But does this information get passed to the OCS / OFCS?

The SMSc uses “Event based charging” to perform credit control, so let’s have a look at what AVPs are present in the Credit Control Request from the SMSc:

Hmm, the SMS-Information AVP (2000) contains a bunch of information about the SMS being sent, but I don’t see anything about the location of the sender in there.

Originator-Interface is just set to “SIP”, of course in a 2G/3G roaming scenario the Originator-SCCP-Address would be that of the Visited PLMN, but for us it is our SCCP address.

Maybe the standard allows for an additional optional AVP in the SMS-Information-AVP we’re missing? Let’s check TS 32.299:

Nope.

So how to deal with this?

While the standards aren’t totally clear on this, we added an IMS-Info AVP and inside that populated the Access-Network-Information directly from the SIP header, and then picked that off inside our OCS in order to apply the correct rules.