Extending the Hotzone Network Connecting The World

2 Network Expansion As the Hotzone expands the need for new services and new applications becomes inherent. Very often the network operator wants to utilise unused bandwidth by selling it in the same manner as Hotspot’s are today. They Want to find instant access methods such as: –Voucher –Credit Card –SMS –IPASS and GRIC type client solutions. –Possibly even PW/UN To do this the operator will need a provisioning system and possibly a billing system. Depending on the manufacturer quiet often the provisioning system is responsible for accepting or denying clients with his credentials access to the network including those who are in another realm and keeping track of used time data etc. Normally billing systems interact with the provisioning system and interrupt the data to provide and invoice which can be sent to the customer.

3 Provisioning systems To add a provisioning system to your Hotzone there are a few points that need to be taken into account to ensure interoperability between the AS.NET Hotzone and the system. –The ControlNET server needs to be the DHCP Server for the network. –Normally there is an authentication gateway placed on each network, many gateways authenticate by MAC address, this will not work on a ControlNET network as in a routed Network the MAC address seen will be that of the last router in this case the ControlNET server. Therefore a gateway that support IP level authentication is needed. –Often provisioning systems are priced on a concurrent user basis, as a level of authentication is already processed by the ControlNET server you may not need PW/UN authentication for all users, a good way to decrease cost is to implement a source IP based router between the ControlNET server and gateway, this will then forward guest traffic to the GW and know traffic to the internet. Remember the ControlNET server can isolate users into subnets enabling guests to be assigned one subnet.

4 Interaction with billing systems The interaction with a billing system varies by vendor but will be somewhat similar for the purpose of this example we will refer to Service factory Orbyte a system tested by Airspan. As mentioned earlier the provisoning system gathers data on users habits and use in CDR format, CDR’s are exported in one of three formats; token-separated, fixed- length, or Basic Encoding Rules (BER). Export and transfer of CDRs is done periodically to a billing system. CDR Example (Token-separated “;”) n; ; ;00:02:2d:23:a9:51;stockholm1;

5 Example CDR Creating Accounting Information Example CDR Creating Accounting Information Client Session Session Information Checks what OSCs are in the system CDRs via (FTP or SCP) Accounting data Verifies that all OSCs have sent accounting data and generates CDRs