Trends and Opportunities
RADIUS accounting, defined in RFC 2866, reports ongoing RADIUS session statistics containing bytes used and time spent on the network. This invaluable information is trusted and relied on by all parties, particularly in Wi-Fi roaming scenarios, as an authoritative record of usage. This usage data may be used for analytics, billing, and settlement. In Wi-Fi roaming, ANPs and IDPs rely on this data to make payments to an ANP (e.g., X cents/GB) and track session time (e.g., person X spent Y minutes at our location).
It has been noticed that a subset of this critical usage data was inaccurate in RADIUS accounting records over time. This inaccuracy was acknowledged by at least one AP/WLC vendor as a software bug. However, similar accounting problems across multiple vendors are still identified.
Business Benefits
WBA Work Group aims to raise awareness and address these accounting inaccuracies to ensure all parties receive accurate RADIUS accounting data in order to increase the confidence of carriers and IDPs that they are accurately charged by ANS for Wi-Fi roaming despite the accounting issues.
This project establishes industry guidelines for Wi-Fi roaming stakeholders including operators, equipment manufacturers, identify providers and network providers. It assesses the possibility of these features going through a certification program. Software bugs are unavoidable. But all parties still need access to accurate and correct accounting information and some plan needs to be established to mitigate the effects of any bugs. Further, a certification program will help avoid these issues altogether.
Expected Deliverables
- Examine the gaps of accuracy in RADIUS such as misreporting of RADIUS accounting messages.
- Clarify the interpretation of RADIUS messages.
- Establish agreed-upon methods to detecting and handling RADIUS accounting sessions that misreport usage data.
- Establish a certification process to minimize misreporting issues.
