Roaming Agreement Research Articles

Unveiling the Insecurity of Operational Cellular Emergency Services (911): Vulnerabilities, Attacks, and Countermeasures

The cellular network offers a ubiquitous emergency call service with its pervasive coverage. In the United States, it can be consumed by dialing 911 for cellular users, and the emergency call is forwarded to the public safety answer point (PSAP), which handles emergency service requests. According to regulatory authority requirements [1,2,3] for cellular emergency services, anonymous user equipment (UE) is allowed to access them without a SIM (Subscriber Identity Module) card, a valid mobile subscription, or a roaming agreement with the visited cellular network. Such support of the cellular emergency services requires different operations from conventional cellular services, thereby increasing the attack surface of the cellular infrastructure.

Effective competition and ineffective mobile industry regulation in South Africa

The most striking feature of South Africa’s mobile market is the skewed allocation of spectrum and a seemingly endless sequence of failed attempts to hold an auction for it. A shortage of spectrum (or the inefficient assignment of it) is blamed, among other things, for South Africa’s relatively slow LTE 4G speeds. Through historical accident, the country has two mobile data networks in addition to the four licensed mobile operators. The response of operators has been to innovate using roaming and network sharing agreements; as we explore in this paper, these have become the de facto spectrum allocation process.This paper looks at how the de facto industry structure has been moulded by spectrum holdings and sharing arrangements and asks how spectrum management could be improved. We observe that, although the number of mobile operators has effectively been reduced to 3 (a number which would raise concern in some circles), there exist a variety of arrangements between those three and other spectrum and network operators. The smallest of the current three mobile operators is still not able to offer a nationwide mobile service without a roaming agreement but, at the same time, the two larger operators depend critically on spectrum and roaming agreements themselves, mainly with the two physical data network operators that function as wholesale providers.The Independent Communications Authority of South Africa (ICASA) was established as a consequence of a new constitution that was adopted in 1996 and it helped to create new institutional arrangements for the burgeoning mobile industry. The authority has nevertheless continued to be hampered, as we shall demonstrate, by political imperatives. This has been pointed out by other authors over the past twenty years and we add to this body of evidence by considering the spectrum auction planned (again) for 2021.The “2021” auction is in fact an iteration of the auction originally announced in May 2010 and then abandoned (Song, 2011). The same thing happened again in 2016 (Paelo & Robb, 2020). Late in 2020, the regulator again announced an auction, due to take place during 2021 but by the second quarter of the year, two of the four national operators had already obtained a court injunction to stop it. The process is intertwined with a political imperative to establish a public wireless open-access network, which we discuss in detail.We describe how the industry has navigated around policy and regulatory dysfunction and how competitive interaction among the South African operators has managed to prevail. Following Hausman & Taylor’s (2013) lead in their work on the United States, in this paper we provide a commentary on apparently perverse outcomes from significant regulatory, judicial and legislative actions (or, perhaps more accurately, inactions) governing the South African mobile telecommunications industry from the commencement of the current constitutional arrangements in 1996 to the present.

An Overview of EV Roaming Protocols

Roaming in electric mobility (EV roaming) enables EV users to make use of any charging station belonging to other networks with only a single user registration based on roaming agreement between operators. This paper presents an overview of the functionalities of the four major existing EV roaming protocols, namely the Open Charge Point Interface (OCPI), the Open InterCharge Protocol (OICP), the Open Clearing House Protocol (OCHP), and the eMobility Inter-operation Protocol (eMIP). This paper focuses on how each EV roaming protocol works in terms of data exchange with the Open Charge Point Protocol (OCPP) which is the de-facto protocol embedded in many charging stations available in the market. Related actors and their roles that are defined in each protocol will be presented. Examples are given in the form of a sequence diagram in order to depict the interaction between actors in the case of user registration, start a charging session, stop a charging session, and billing. This paper concludes that employing the sequence diagram is one effective method to achieve a fast learning curve while studying the EV roaming protocols.

A novel federated strong mobile signature service—The Finnish case

This paper describes the legal framework, architecture with standards and signature services of the new public Finnish federated strong mobile signature scheme. Mobile signatures are used, for example, for user identification and authentication, the message authentication, non-repudiation of transactions and verifying the information integrity. The service is based on mobile PKI and on the federation of security assertions using ETSI MSS standards. The service provider needs an agreement only with one operator. Then all services in the Circle of Trust may request authentication and digital signing from user even if a service provider has made an agreement with other competing operator than the home operator of the user. The signature service platform is extremely secure using strong two-factor and two-channel model. All personal security credentials are stored and the crypto-operations run in the mobile operator׳s tamper-proof secure element, UICC. The Finnish mobile signature service fulfils the strong identification in the Finnish ‘Identification’ Act. The service platform offers potentially to millions of Finnish citizens and the participating Finnish businesses convenient to use and trusted signature services on various service channels for applications hosted on the premises or in the cloud. Signature services can be used also abroad where SMS services are provided and where user׳s operator has a roaming agreement.

Kerberos based authentication for inter-domain roaming in wireless heterogeneous network

An increased demand in ubiquitous high speed wireless access has led integration of different wireless technologies provided by different administrative domains creating truly a heterogeneous network. Security is one of the major hurdles in such network environment. As a mobile station moves in and out of the coverage area of one wireless network to another, it needs to be authenticated. The existing protocols for authentication of a mobile station are typically centralized, where the home network participates in each authentication process. It requires home network to maintain roaming agreement with all other visiting networks. Moreover, the round trip time to home network results high latency. This paper is focused on developing authentication protocol for wireless network irrespective of the technologies or the administrative domain. We propose a secure protocol which adopts strong features of Kerberos based on tickets for rigorous mutual authentication and session key establishment along with issuance of token so that the mobile station can have access to not only the roaming partner of home network but also to the roaming partner of previous visited networks. The performance evaluation and comparative analysis of the proposed protocol is carried out with the already implemented standard protocols and most remarkable research works till date to confirm the solidity of the results presented.

(Static) Non-cooperative Foreclosing or Collusive Equilibria in the Upstream Roaming Market are Sustainable Even If There Exist More Incumbents: A Model on the MVNOs Entry

The paper proves that (static) non cooperative foreclosing or collusive equilibria in the upstream roaming market are sustainable even if there exist more incumbents. In particular we focus on the complementarity that occurs when an incumbent upstream signs a roaming agreement with a new competitor. The first implication is a clear attitude to implement a less aggressive price war in the downstream market. Moreover, when the incumbents are tacitly coordinated at some foreclosing roaming proposals, the deviator is the only one affected by the downstream complementarity with the entrant and there exists an immediate instrument for punishing the deviator downstream. This attitude is just given by the lack of complementarity. In the first part of the paper we give some evidences that even if exogenous, the entries of new competitors have represented a significative increasing in the diffusion speed of mobile communication service. We propose an Arellano-Bond dynamic panel data estimation on European countries from 1985 to 2003.

Critical issues for roaming in 3G

Roaming for voice, the ability for a user to make and receive calls when visiting another country, is taken for granted by GSM users today. Currently GSM mobile operators are introducing packet-based data networks (also known as General Packet Radio Service) that bring a huge variety of services. However, this new network also introduces new complexity in the support of the packet-based roaming scenario. Due to the number of services, operators, and users envisaged, it will be impossible for operators to test all services for roaming in all partner networks for GPRS; instead, the capabilities of the network have to be tested. Furthermore, mobile data service developers must be aware that the network capabilities of a visited (GPRS) network might differ from the home network; thus, consideration is required to ensure service continuity. This is especially true as mobile operators start offering 3G networks and support roaming agreements from 3G to 2G networks. In the continuing development of the mobile network, 3GPP (the international standardization body developing the UMTS standards) has defined the IP multimedia subsystem (IMS) as an evolutionary path for basic 3G networks (developing on the already defined Release 99 and Release 4 capabilities). The IMS provides an overlay architecture on top of the basic 3G architecture and implies roaming outside the basic 3G architecture. The resulting 3G-IMS network creates a two-layered roaming architecture, potentially resulting in issues related to optimal routing, QoS, and support of local services. The challenge for the industry cannot be pointed out as one difficult technical issue that needs to be solved to ensure 3G roaming. Instead there many smaller issues with many alternative solutions that need to be solved. Only when operators have a clear view of these issues and their roaming requirements can all issues be solved and roaming agreement negotiations run smoothly. As it looks today, it will be time consuming to establish and conclude the roaming agreements for 3G; thus, delays in the roaming service are expected. When IMS arrives, new addendums will be needed to the roaming agreements, and the same risk for delays exists if the demand issues are not properly addressed before the negotiations.