Managing Wireless HotSpots: The Uni-Fy Approach

Mauro Brunato, Danilo Severina, Renato Lo Cigno
Dipartimento di Informatica e Telecomunicazioni
Università di Trento - Italy

MedHocNet 2006, Lipari (Italy), June 14-17 2006.

This paper presents and discusses user, account, and traffic management
in a WLAN based HotSpot. The HotSpot is a large WLAN infrastructure at
the Faculty of Science of the University of Trento, that uses a novel
access management architecture named Uni-Fy developed at the University
of Trento, and where roughly 20.000 users can have free access.

The management scheme, named Uni-Fy, is based on the concept of Open
Access Networks and manages the users access, privileges and traffic
based on the users profiles and authentication provided by remote
service providers, hence acting as an enabling factor rather than as an
autonomous service itself.

Finally we provide some measurements and experience based on nearly one
year of operation.