Existing devices for processing telecommunications data include a first infrastructure in the form of a telecommunications infrastructure for transporting payload signals for terminal users, i.e. signals transporting information to be presented on those user terminals (voice, pictures, data), and a second infrastructure for storing data about the utilization of the telecommunications service provided by the first infrastructure, e.g. for billing purposes.
This utilization data for each connection involving a terminal is stored in a memory of the second infrastructure.
Consequently, because of the correspondingly large number of connections involving the terminals, the second infrastructure has to manage a large quantity of utilization data.
There are two approaches to generating this utilization data.
A first approach consists in generating and storing utilization data in batches, as contrasted with a second approach that consists in generating and storing utilization data in real time.
The first approach has the drawback of imposing an undesirable time-delay in the processing of utilization data, and also necessitates the use of very costly machines having a very large memory space.
The technique used at present by systems that adopt the real-time approach has the drawback that it is not stabilized, in the sense that it has difficulties processing in real time very large quantities of utilization data, for example the utilization data for several thousand connections per second.
The introduction of content services using the Universal Mobile Telecommunication System (UMTS) and asynchronous digital subscriber lines (ADSL) will increase exponentially the number of connections and the volumes of utilization data associated with these services. This increase in traffic will generate ever-higher costs in terms of memory size and offers no guarantee that real-time performance will be achieved with these volumes of utilization data, since real time performance implies a particular and limited processing time, for example around one second between the end of a connection involving a terminal and storage of the corresponding utilization data in the second infrastructure. At present, with several tens of millions of potential terminals and an average of seven or eight connection requests or connections per terminal per day, there is no system offering real-time performance that is capable of absorbing all the traffic.