A cost-efficient server architecture for real-time credit-control

The importance of mobile and electronic commerce results in much attention given to credit-control systems. There are high non-functional requirements on such systems, e.g. high availability and reliability. These requirements can be met by changing the architecture of the credit-control system. In this paper the authors suggested a new architecture and a number of alternative implementations of credit-control server. By quantifying the availability, reliability, performance and cost the designers enabled to make better trade-off decisions. The new architecture was compared with the current, "state-of-the-art" solution. Finally, suggestions for the system developers concerning the choice of an appropriate architecture implementation variant were presented.