This paper addresses the problem of AAA routing in roaming situations over heterogeneous wireless networks. While traveling, a mobile user often initiates an authentication process with the user’s home network AAA server to use the resources of a remote network. In the process, the user wants to affect the selection of a roaming path to the user’s home network, because pricing and other services differ by the path. We present a network-based solution for the selection that eliminates the necessity of user’s inquiring, collecting, and analyzing data over, possibly, heterogeneous wireless networks. The solution assists the user in selecting a roaming path with respect to a user-preferred metric and performing a mutual authentication afterward via the selected path. We first propose a routing and label computation algorithm for generating pre-provisioned routes through which authentication traffic would pass. At the heart of the solution is a mutual authentication protocol that, together with registration, handshake, and route deviation detection schemes, provides a secure, privacy preserving, and ultra-lightweight way of authentication. Using password-based identification, the solution is generic and requires no particular transmission mechanism, payload, or routing framework. It should be incrementally deployable over selected AAA servers interoperable with existing AAA infrastructure not knowing of the solution.

AAA routing, authentication, security, heterogeneous wireless networks