AAA Introduction and Overview

 

 

This chapter provides the information on how to configure the AAA interface to enable authentication, authorization, and accounting (AAA) functionality for your core network service subscribers in a wireless carrier network.

This chapter provides information on basic AAA features. For information on product-specific AAA features, refer to the administration guide for the product that you are deploying.

 

Overview

The Authentication, authorization, and accounting (AAA) subsystem on the chassis provides the basic framework to configure access control on your network. The AAA subsystem in core network supports Remote Authentication Dial-In User Service (RADIUS) and Diameter protocol based AAA interface support. The AAA subsystem also provides a wide range of configurations for AAA servers in groups, which in effect contain a series of RADIUS/Diameter parameters for each application. This allows a single group to define a mix of Diameter and RADIUS servers for the various application functions.

Although AAA functionality is available through AAA subsystem, the chassis provides onboard access control functionality for simple access control through subscriber/APN authentication methods.

AAA functionality provides capabilities to operator to enable authentication and authorization for a subscriber or a group of subscriber through domain or APN configuration. The AAA interface provides the following AAA support to a network service:

 

•

Authentication: It is the method of identifying users, including login and password, challenge and response, messaging support, and encryption. Authentication is the way to identify a subscriber prior to being allowed access to the network and network services. An operator can configure AAA authentication by defining a list of authentication methods, and then applying that list to various interfaces.

All authentication methods, except for chassis-level authentication, must be defined through AAA configuration.

•

Authorization: It is the method to provide access control, including authorization for a subscriber or domain profile. AAA authorization sends a set of attributes to the service describing the services that the user can access. These attributes determine the user’s actual capabilities and restrictions.

•	Accounting: Collects and sends subscriber usage and access information used for billing, auditing, and reporting, such as user identities, start and stop times, performed actions, number of packets, and number of bytes.

Accounting enables operator to analyze the services users are accessing as well as the amount of network resources they are consuming. Accounting records are comprised of accounting AVPs and are stored on the accounting server. This accounting information can then be analyzed for network management, client billing, and/or auditing.

Advantages of using AAA are:

 

•	Higher flexibility for subscriber access control configuration

•	Better accounting, charging, and reporting options

•	Industry standard RADIUS and Diameter authentication

The following figure shows a typical AAA server group configuration that includes three AAA servers (RADIUS and Diameter).

 

AAA Server Group Configuration in a Core Network

 

Supported Products and License

AAA interface support is available for all services running on the Cisco chassis.

Important: Information to configure product-specific AAA interfaces are provided in the respective Administration Guides.

Some of the features such as Prepaid Accounting and Diameter interface support are licensed features.

Important: Use of the AAA interface features requires that a valid license key be installed. Contact your local Sales or Support representative for information on how to obtain a license.

 

Diameter Proxy

The proxy acts as an application gateway for Diameter. It gets the configuration information at process startup and decides which Diameter peer has to be contacted for each application. It establishes the peer connection if no peer connection already exists. Upon receiving the answer, it uses the Diameter session ID to identify to which application the message is intended.

Each PSC has a Diameter proxy identified by the IPv6 origin host address. If the number of configured origin hosts is lesser than the number of active PSCs, some (i.e. those number where no origin hosts associated with) PSCs will not activate Diameter processing at all, and instead notify administrators of the erroneous configuration with syslog/traps.

If the number of configured origin hosts is greater than the number of active PSCs, the application will automatically select which configured host is to be used per PSC.

 

Supported Features

This section provides the list of features that are supported by RADIUS and Diameter.

 

Diameter Server Selection for Load-balancing

Diameter load balancing implementation maintains a fixed number of servers active at all times for load balancing in case of failures. This can be done by selecting a server with lower weight and adding it to the set of active servers.

Consider the following requirements in the Diameter Endpoint configuration for load balancing:

•	Endpoint configuration is needed to specify the minimum number of servers that needs to be active for the service.

•	If any one of the servers in the current active group fails, one of the idle servers needs to be selected for servicing the new requests.

•	New sessions should be assigned to idle servers with higher weight.

•	New session should be assigned to idle servers with lower weight only if

•	The number of active servers are less than the minimum number of servers required for the service

•	Idle servers with higher priority are not available

For information on the commands used for configuring the load-balancing feature, refer to the Command Line Interface Reference.

 

Fire-and-Forget Feature

The current release supports configuring secondary AAA accounting group for the APN. This supports the RADIUS Fire-and-Forget feature in conjunction with GGSN for secondary accounting (with different RADIUS accounting group configuration) to the RADIUS servers without expecting acknowledgement from the server, in addition to standard RADIUS accounting. This secondary accounting will be an exact copy of all the standard RADIUS accounting message (RADIUS Start / Interim / Stop) sent to the standard AAA RADIUS server.

This feature also supports configuring secondary AAA accounting group for the subscriber template. This supports the No-ACK RADIUS Targets feature in conjunction with PDSN and HA for secondary accounting (with different RADIUS accounting group configuration) to the RADIUS servers without expecting the acknowledgement from the server, in addition to standard RADIUS accounting. This secondary accounting will be an exact copy of all the standard RADIUS accounting message (RADIUS Start / Interim / Stop) sent to the standard AAA RADIUS server.

Typically, the request sent to the Radius Accounting Server configured under the AAA group with the CLI "radius accounting fire-and-forget" configured will not expect a response from the server. If there is a need to send the request to multiple servers, the accounting algorithm first-n will be used in the AAA group.

If the server is down, the request is sent to the next server in the group. If all the servers in the group are down, then the request is deleted.

Important: Please note that on- the-fly change in the configuration is not permitted. Any change in the configuration will have effect only for the new calls.

For information on the commands used for configuring this feature, refer to the Command Line Interface Reference.

 

Realm-based Routing

In Release 12.0 and later releases, the Diameter routing logic has been modified to enable routing to destination hosts that are not directly connected to the Diameter clients like GGSN, MME, PGW, and that does not have a route entry configured. Message routing to the host is based on the realm of the host.

For a given session towards a Destination Host, all the messages belonging to the session will be routed through the same peer until the peer is down. If the peer goes down, for the subsequent messages failure handling mechanism will be triggered and the message will be sent using other available peers connected to the destination host.

 

Dynamic Route Addition

Dynamic routes are added when a response to a diameter request message arrives with Origin-Host AVP. If there is no route entry corresponding to the Origin-Host, realm and peer, a new dynamic route entry is created and added to the table. This route entry will be flagged as Dynamic and a Path Cache entry. The following entries will be added to the dynamic route entry.

 

•	Flag (Dynamic and Path-Cache)

•	Host name (Corresponding to the Origin-Host from the response)

•	Realm (Obtained from the session)

•	Application id (Obtained from the session)

•	Peer (From which the response was received)

•	Weight (Inherit the weight of the realm-based route entry based on which the request was routed)

 

Dynamic Route Deletion

The dynamic route will be deleted from the routing table in the following conditions:

 

•	The peer associated with the route-entry is deleted.

•	When the route is not used by any of the sessions for a given period of time.

•	When the realm based route from which the dynamic route is derived, is deleted.

The route deletion can be accomplished by introducing a new CLI in the Diameter Endpoint configuration mode. This CLI allows configuring an expiry timeout based on which the route entry will be deleted.

For information on the commands used for configuring the realm-based routing feature, refer to the Command Line Interface Reference.

 

Cisco Systems Inc.

Tel: 408-526-4000

Fax: 408-527-0883