Call Detail Record Generator
Our call detail records (CDR) generator is developed with GEDIS Studio and is available on-line. The purpose of this generator is to produce both Customer Data Records and Call Data Records by simulating the behaviour of the users of a carrier's mobile GSM network.
Test Data Generated
Beyond the quality of generated CDR, our solution is unique because it provides you with all the data you will need for testing a Telecom Information System component.
Consider testing the Rating system, it requires both CDR and customer data to compute the cost of each CDR. Obviously, the part identifying a customer in our generated CDRs must match the customer data defined in the Customer Database the rating refers to.
So, the process of producing test CDR must consider the way your tested system may refers to existing customers. In this project, you will have the choice of integrating existing customer data or generate them to inject them in the test environment.
Customer Data Record
For Customer data record we consider two types of data, the ones that are related to the network and will be found in the CDR and the ones that are business oriented and that will be found in the customer data repository used by the tested application.
Business data in a customer record are used to select the appropriate service consumption profile that will control the CDR to generate for a given customer. For example, you may a have field such as the "service subscriptions" for a customer and map values for that to an appropriate CDR profile.
Customer Telecom Data are Structured and Standardized
We have made much attention to the quality of the telecom data generated for each customer to ensure the conformity with the applicable telecommunication numbering plans. Indeed, MS-ISDN, IMSI and IMEI are structured data with inner correlation constraints and inter-field correlation constraints as well.
For example, take the IMSI number. The three first position identify the country of origin of the carrier operator of the customer, it is named the Mobile Country Code. The two next positions is a code for identifying the carrier itself, it is named the Network Network Code. So, the pair MCC - MNC is strongly correlated.
The MS-ISDN is itself a structured data. The value of its prefix depends on the network carrier.. Therefor, you cannot generate the IMSI prefix and MS-ISDN prefix independently!
Our solution for generating telecom customer data takes into account those constraints. Moveover, the configuration of the generator is business oriented and when generating customer data you just have to choose the network operator for which you generate data for. GEDIS Studio will take care of selecting the appropriate structure and values for MSISDN,IMSI and IMEI prefixes.
Call Detail Record
The generated CDR are multi parts and each part of a CDR groups a subset of the CSV fields by type of information they contain.
For example, the first part is related to customer data, the second part is related to the call type (outgoing, incoming, voice, SMS, etc.), the third part is related to time (date and time of call, call duration), the fourth part is related to the correspondent (MS-ISDN, type of correspondent, etc.). And there may be other parts produced by the mediation such as data about the network equipment that has produced the CDR etc.
Customer Usage Profiles
Our CDR generator is profile-based, which means that you can control the CDR generated for a customer by associating that customer to a usage profile.
Basically, a profile is a sequence of usage patterns. Each usage pattern explains how the customer is consuming a given service. Each pattern will produce the consumption fields for successive CDR.
You can define a usage pattern for incoming voice calls, outgoing voice calls to local correspondents, outgoing voice calls to foreign countries, etc.
It is a best practice to describe a single type of service consumption in a given pattern and to fill a profile with all the services available for the customers this profile will be associated to.
For example, a profile may have a pattern for outgoing voice calls, another for incoming voice calls, a third for incoming SMS, and so on.
But you can also define in the same profile two usage patterns for the same type of service usage but with different configurations.
For example, you may have a pattern for outgoing calls toward national correspondents and another pattern for outgoing call as well but this time towards correspondents of foreign countries in a predefined list.
Test Data Production Process
Producing realistic and controlled CDR test data for a set of customers is a multi step process. At each step a new file is generated to be used as input for the next step.
- Generate or obtain customer data
- Associate each customer to a usage profile
- Generate the CDR sequence for each customer according to its profile
The two firsts generated data file are customer data, they can be either extracted from your production / test environment or generated and injected into your test environment. The point is that some of those customer data, we identify as "Telecom Data" will be included in the generated CDR and will ensure the consistency of generated CDR with the other data managed by the tested application.
Without this management of customer data, your test CDR may be just rejected because refering to unknown customers.
Step 1 : Creating Customer data
Customer data are made of business data and telecom data. Business information data are only needed if your customer data are generated (and not extracted from your test environment) and need specific fields for being injected in the customer repository of your test environment. Besides, the business data may also include one or several fields that will be use to select the appropriate profile
In our demonstration we designed a customer data generator that uses a generic Personal Data generator with fields such as: Gender, Salutation, First Name, Last Name, Age, Date of Birth, Marital Status, Address, etc. Then, we add "Telecom" data such as IMSI, IMEI, MS-ISDN, Subscription Plan.
The values generated for the fields MS-ISDN, IMSI and IMEI take into account the international numbering plans. For example, the prefix of the IMSI gives the country code and the network carrier code. Then the MS-ISDN is also formatted according to the country of the customer's carrier.
Our sample file is based on the 3 carriers operating in France (eg. Orange, SFR and Bouygues Telecom). You can have a look at the 
Customer Data Sample generated by GEDIS Studio.
Step 2 - Maping Customers to Profiles
Then comes the real magic. Because our data generation is profile based, we have to define the profiles and associate each customer to one of those profiles. For the sake of simplicity in this demonstration we have limited ourselves to those usage profiles (value applicable for a 1 day period):
- Profile 1 is for 10 Voice calls only, for a total of 30 min. and towards national correspondents
- Profile 2 is for 5 to 15 Voice calls for a total 45 min. and for 0 to 5 SMS, towards national correspondents
- Profile 3 is for 4 to 17 Voice calls for a total of 1h05 and for 3 to 7 SMS, towards national and a list of foreign countries,
The association between a customer and its profile is achieved by mapping the customer's PLAN field value to a profile. Remember that the PLAN field is to be found in the business data part of the customer data record.
Again to simplify the demonstration we have limited ourselves to 4 different subscription plans in order to illustrate that there's no necessarely a perfect 1 to 1 match between a customer plan and its profile.
The maping table implemented in our demonstration is as follow:
- All customers with subscription plan PLAN1 will have profile #1
- All customers with subscription plan PLAN2 will have profile #2
- 30% of customers with subscription plan PLAN3 will have profile #3
- 70% of customers with subscription plan PLAN3 will have profile #2
- All customer with subscription plan PLAN4 will have profile #3
Want to read more about profiles ? expand
Step 3 - Creating Calls for Each Customer
The third generated file is therefor the CDR file containing the part of the customer data usually available from the network (MS-ISDN,IMSI,IMEI) and some customer data the mediation may get from the CRM (such as the customer plan for example).
The duration of each call is computed from the total duration of the call of the usage pattern. Each duration is randomly chosen around the mean so that the sum of those durations exactly match the duration provided in the usage pattern!
The time of call for each CDR is also computed in order to make sure that two calls for the same customer never overlap!
You can have a look at the CDR Data Sample
CDR Generator Demonstration
To access the simple CDR generator you can follow the link bellow, choose your own generator parameters and GEDIS Studio will generate your test data.
