In a communications network that provides services to a plurality of
users, events occurring during service processing are accumulated in an
event record and sent to a record processor to perform post-processing,
such as assessing charges to be billed to users of the network. Each
service processing node in the communications network accumulates event
records, bundles them with instructions as to how they are be processed,
and dispatches them to one or more record processors. Before being sent
to a record processor, an event record is augmented with instructions
describing how to perform processing upon the events in the event record.
The record processors are general-purpose processors and the instructions
for post-processing are carried within the event records themselves.
Post-processors are no longer required to be dedicated to a particular
purpose such as billing computation. Furthermore, deployment of
post-processing function is more timely and can be integrated with
deployment of service processing functions to network service processors.