Patent ID: 8358616

Claim:
A peer-to-peer communication charging method, comprising: performing by a service application server, upon receipt of a session request message for establishing a peer-to-peer communication originated from a client: generating, by the service application server, an application layer charging message, wherein the application layer charging message comprises peer-to-peer session information of the peer-to-peer communication, an IP Multimedia subsystem (IMS) layer charging correlation identifier (ICID) and a bearer layer charging correlation identifier (GCID); sending, by the service application server, the application layer charging message to a charging system; utilizing by the charging system, the application layer charging message to obtain charging information of the corresponding IMS layer and bearer layer, and to correlate the obtained charging information to further obtain information on bearer traffic transmitted in the peer-to-peer communication; wherein the correlating comprising: correlating the IMS layer charging message with the application layer charging message in accordance with the IMS layer charging correlation identifier (ICID) in the application layer and the IMS layer charging correlation identifier (GCID) in the IMS layer charging message; correlating the IMS layer charging message and the bearer layer charging message in accordance with the bearer layer charging correlation identifier (GCID) in the IMS layer charging message and the bearer layer charging correlation identifier (GCID) in the bearer layer charging message, and then correlating the bearer layer charging message with the application layer charging message; obtaining same port numbers and peer-to-peer uniform resource locators in the bearer layer charging information of the correlated bearer layer charging message as port numbers and peer-to-peer uniform resource locators (URLs) in an application layer charging information of the correlated application layer charging message; and obtaining the information on bearer traffic transmitted during the session in accordance with the obtained peer-to-peer uniform resource locators and the port numbers.