Automatic Roaming Consortium Discovery and Routing for Large-Scale Wireless LAN Roaming Systems

The Next Generation Hotspot (NGH), based on the Hotspot 2.0 specification, is being introduced as a new conceptual standard that brings higher security and usability to Public Wireless LAN. There has been a movement in recent years for connecting some Roaming Consortia (RC) by NGH to develop a Large-Scale Wireless LAN roaming system. However, a routing problem has been identified in the identity federation system when an RC consisting of multiple operators is being connected. A typical example is eduroam, the roaming system for research and education institutions, having thousands of different realms. It is hard for wireless Service Providers (SPs) to find which RC the authentication requests should be sent to. To deal with this problem, this paper develops a Hub Proxy with learning-based automatic RC discovery and routing. The effectiveness of the system has been confirmed through some experiments using a virtual inter-roaming federation network.