Data Collection Protocols: IPDR

IPDR.org, founded in 1999, is an open consortium of service providers, equipment vendors, system integrators, and billing and mediation vendors. They collaborate to facilitate the exchange of usage and service measurement between network and hosting elements and operations and business support systems by deploying IPDR the de facto standard. IPDR.org, a nonprofit organization, is facilitating service measurement and exchange for emerging services. It targets emerging services such as voice over IP, CableLabs DOCSIS, WLAN access service, streaming media service, and more.

IPDR stands for Internet Protocol Detail Record; the name comes from the traditional telecom term CDR (Call Detail Record), used to record information about usage activity within the telecom infrastructure, such as call completion.

IPDR promotes the use of IPDR Network Data Management–Usage (NDM-U), which lays a framework for a standard mechanism to exchange usage data between systems. NDM-U defines a mechanism to create and transport either files or streams of network usage information that follow the IPDR format. IPDR uses an information modeling technique based on the use of a subset of the XML Schema specification language, in conjunction with a well-defined mapping to a binary format based on the eXtensible Data Record (XDR, RFC 1832). XDR is a standard for the description and encoding of data: it forms the basis of Sun's Remote Procedure Call and Network File System protocols and has proven to be both space- and processing-efficient. The XML record structure and service definitions provide a means to begin representing service usage information in a self-describing human-readable or machine-readable format. IPDR uses a subset of the XML Schema language for extensibility, thus allowing for vendor- and application-specific extensions of the data model.

IPDR.org released the IPDR Streaming Protocol (IPDR/SP) specification in 2004; it provides an advanced streaming protocol for accounting information exchange. The IPDR Streaming Protocol is a real-time reporting protocol that works with templates, negotiated between the collector and the exporter. Possible transport protocols may be TCP or SCTP, or even BEEP (RFC 3080). The IPDR streaming protocol offers reliability with the transport protocol itself and with IPDR streaming protocol-level acknowledgments. Note that the IPDR streaming protocol is largely based on the CRANE protocol. For further information, refer to http://www.ipdr.org.

The authors' view is that the NDM-U and IPDR streaming protocols focus on the exchange of usage information between collecting mediation systems and Business Support Systems (BSS), always with the notion of service consumer perspective in mind. Therefore, the areas of applicability of the NDM-U and IPDR streaming protocols are the higher layers of the TMN, as opposed to the TMN Network Elements Layer.