A REVIEW ON 3GPP PCC ARCHITECTURE EVOLUTION FROM RELEASES 7 TO 14

Quality of Service (QoS) is one of the most important aspects of internet protocol (IP)-based networksespecially because of the network traffic increase in recent years due to the rise of a plethora of multimedia applications. Thus, network operatorsneed robust QoS frameworks to help them achieve traffic prioritization and avoid network congestion.Moreover, these frameworks should be able to apply QoS, on a per-service and per-user basis and services should be charged according to the subscribed QoS. All this should be done in a unified and flexible manner. Policy and Charging Control (PCC) was introduced by the Third Generation Partnership Project (3GPP) in order to fill all those needs in IP Multimedia Subsystem (IMS) networks. This paper aims to survey the evolution of the 3GPP PCC framework from releases 7 to 14.