A survey on AAA mechanisms, protocols, and architectures and a policy-based approach beyond: Ax

Abstract

AAA, the Authentication, Authorization, and Accounting approach for dial-up connectivity of mobile users and devices has reached a status of maturity, however, limited to a dedi cated set of minor scenarios. While the commercialization of the Internet has lead to a large variety of business models based on Internet technology, the demand for standardized and efficient solutions in support of reliable, secure, open, and flexible remote service accesses has increased. In addi tion to the traditional AAA approach, emerging support ser vices, such as policy support, charging, pricing, and auditing for Internet services, are required essentially to offer as a ser vice provider a viable set of distributed data communication and content services. As discussed in this work, the existing work on a AAA Architecture still considers dedicated cases and lacks a sce nario-independent and generic approach. Therefore, the approach termed Ax Architecture, is proposed to enable a generic and integrated way of dealing in a policy-based man ner with these support services, which a public service pro vider must offer for mobile as well as fixed users. This generic Ax Architecture is motivated by indicating basic areas of concern, discussing existing protocols, mechanisms, and data types, and the development of the architecture’s scope and major modules required for Ax . Driven by business model needs, but focussed on the technical design and implementa tion only, this proposed work enables business cases as a top level policy, charging as an economic policy, and QoS sup port for end-to-end services in the Internet