Subject: (radius) Some newbee questions

From: "Snorre Corneliussen" <[email-masked]>
Date: Wed, 21 Apr 1999 10:57:07 +0200

Hi.
My name is Snorre Corneliussen. I'm employed at Ericsson in Norway and I'm
currently working with H.323 Gatekeepers. We are using RADIUS as both an
authentication and accounting protocol for H.323 traffic. We have used
RADIUS for about a year and I have only followed the mailing list for a
month or two. I therefore consider myself as a newbee when it comes to
understanding the future development of RADIUS. So don't hesitate to give me
feedback if my questions are far of the RADIUS track.
When using IP telephony we send start and stop RADIUS accounting events from
the gatekeeper to a AAA server. They are used for sending accounting
information about when the call was started, and when it was stopped, plus
some additional information about the call. We also use the response
messages to start and stop to provide pre-paid and Advice of Charge
information back our system and then to the user.
This works fine when you look at the static usage of resources for a single
IP telephony call. The problem occurs when we want to provide a more dynamic
accounting information to the AAA server. When using more of the features of
H.323 than only IP telephony, the use of resources will often change several
time during the call. This means that we want a continues update of the
Advice of Charge and pre-paid parameters. We use the specified interim
message specified in draft-ietf-radius-acct-interim-01.txt. If I have
understood this draft correctly the interim message is only used to send a
pre-stop message in case the system crash or the stop message is lost. It is
therefore sent a regular intervals. This is of course a problem for us
because this means that it can happen that some usage of resources has
changed twice during the interim interval. We therefore consider to send
them at more random intervals. Is this a problem ?
Another problem we have is that if you have a scenario where you want to
charge for usage that is not time-related you have to send both a start and
a stop message. Let me give you an example. If you have an address
translation service. You want to charge the user when we uses this service
to i.e. translate from an e164 number to an IP-address (often done by
gatekeepers). This is not a usage of a service with a time component. I read
somewhere that you can not only send a RADIUS accounting stop message, you
have to send a start first. I guess that this requirement is added to ease
the implementations of AAA servers. My question is, couldn't it be nice to
have a RADIUS accounting message type that is both a start and a stop
message. An example of such a message is a ticket. Using tickets is quite
popular when charging for WEB content.
If somebody would give me some reflections on my questions I would be very
happy.
Best Regards
 Snorre :-)

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