Inter-federation Roaming Architecture for Large-scale Wireless LAN Roaming Systems

Abstract

Wireless LAN Roaming enables users to be authenticated and authorized for access to networks at various places they visit. The largest roaming federation today is probably eduroam developed for research and education institutions. There have been some projects for developing roaming federations for public wireless LAN services as well. Since the introduction of the Next Generation Hotspot concept, the need to interconnect these roaming federations has emerged. However, some technical problems exist and these need to be addressed simultaneously. In this paper, we analyze existing roaming systems and develop an inter-federation roaming architecture with the aim of realizing a worldwide Wireless LAN roaming system that would accommodate eduroam. To realize realm-based routing of authentication requests across different federations and to achieve system scalability, the roaming architecture is designed to use regional hubs instead of a single exchange hub. We also aim to develop an actual roaming platform for secure public wireless LAN services based on the developed architecture. The developed platform was implemented and tested in the City Wi-Fi Roaming trials conducted by the Wireless Broadband Alliance.