An Evaluation of Real-Time Processing of Call Detail Records Using Stream Processing

Abstract

A common problem plaguing the telecommunication industry is how to process the gigantic amounts of Call Detail Records (CDR) data it generates. Currently, telecommunication companies use batch processing systems to process CDR data at intervals ranging from 5 minutes to 24 hours, and even then, not all data is processed. Present batch processing platforms are vendor based, requiring proprietary software, specialized hardware and licenses. Because of this, processing of CDR data is expensive and has prevented telecommunication companies from gaining all the benefits that could be acquired by the effective and total processing of CDR data. With the strides made in big data recently and especially in stream processing, total processing of CDR data is made possible, furthermore, stream processing facilitates the real-time processing of data. This research primarily focuses on stream processing of CDR data, this would be of benefit to telecommunication companies seeking to gain complex, intricate and speedy insights into their customers and networks. This research also involves a feature comparison of several stream processing platforms in use today for the purposes of selecting a single suitable platform for this project. The selected platform is then evaluated in terms of performance and resource usage, all in an effort to determine whether the selected stream processing platform is suitable for the real-time processing of CDR data.