AAA for Spontaneous Roaming Agreements in Heterogeneous Wireless Networks

A current challenge in heterogeneous wireless networks is to enable them to work together in a spontaneous fashion, without having pre-established roaming agreements. Currently, formal roaming agreements are manually set up, which is a costly and time-consuming process. It is highly desirable for network cooperation to be established on the fly. However, establishing spontaneous roaming agreement is a very challenging research issue. This paper presents a novel AAA (Authentication, Authorization and Accounting) architecture to support policy-based negotiation for establishing spontaneous roaming agreements. The new architecture integrates policy-based negotiation into the normal user association and authentication process for spontaneous and dynamic roaming agreements and interworking. This integration minimizes changes to existing AAA architecture for enabling the new paradigm of automated provider interworking and cooperation.