Network Independent Quality of Service : The role of Authentication, Authorization, and Accouting in a roaming environment

Abstract: With the increasing shift to the Internet Protocol [3] for all networks and the desire of telecommunications service providers to offer new value to their customers, the need exists to coordinate the delivery of end-to-end quality of service so that providers may offer new services to support their customer’s applications. The key objective of the EuQoS project is to research, integrate, test, validate, and demonstrate end-to-end QoS technologies to support advanced QoS-aware applications over multiple, heterogeneous research, scientific, and industrial network domains. End-to-end quality of service support for multiple applications is a great added value and could become the next major growth spurt in the telecommunications industry. A crucial requirement for the QoS model is that it must not add significant complexity to the existing mechanisms and must be compatible with legacy applications and equipment. Proxy signaling handlers will be used to satisfy the latter constraint. This thesis analyzes possible roaming scenarios and how Authentication, Authorization, and Accounting should be tackled. I seek to provide reasonable solutions and to consider the current environment, always trying to re-use, when possible, the existing architecture and components.