A survey on AAA mechanisms, protocols, and architectures and a policy-based approach beyond: Ax

AAA, the Authentication, Authorization, and Accounting approach for dial-up connectivity of mobile users and devices has reached a status of maturity, however, limited to a dedicated set of minor scenarios. While the commercialization of the Internet has lead to a large variety of business models based on Internet technology, the demand for standardized and efficient solutions in support of reliable, secure, open, and flexible remote service accesses has increased. In addition to the traditional AAA approach, emerging support services, such as policy support, charging, pricing, and auditing for Internet services, are required essentially to offer as a service provider a viable set of distributed data communication and content services. As discussed in this work, the existing work on a AAA Architecture still considers dedicated cases and lacks a scenario-independent and generic approach. Therefore, the approach termed Ax Architecture, is proposed to enable a generic and integrated way of dealing in a policy-based manner with these support services, which a public service provider must offer for mobile as well as fixed users. This generic Ax Architecture is motivated by indicating basic areas of concern, discussing existing protocols, mechanisms, and data types, and the development of the architecture’s scope and major modules required for Ax. Driven by business model needs, but focussed on the technical design and implementation only, this proposed work enables business cases as a top level policy, charging as an economic policy, and QoS support for end-to-end services in the Internet.