Light-Weight AAA Infrastructure for Mobility Support Across Heterogeneous Networks

Abstract

Security and privacy architecture for various access networks have often been considered on the upper service layers in the form of application and transport security and from lower layers in the form of security over wireless networks. Today there is no trust relationship between the stakeholders of different access network types for e.g. wireless mesh network, wireless PAN, wireless LAN, cellular network, satellite etc. and each have their own security mechanism. What is common for these access networks is the networking layer which is IP based. In order to provide seamless service across these heterogeneous access networks there must be a trust relationship among the stakeholders for authentication, authorization, accounting and billing of end user. However, what is still missing is a general solution which is both adaptable to the network types and conditions and also takes into account end system capabilities as well as enabling inter-domain AAA negotiation. This paper proposes a light-weight AAA infrastructure providing continuous, on-demand, end-to-end security in heterogeneous networks.