8/27/09

RADIUS Diameter Gateway

We come across many issues involving RADIUS to Diameter connectivity with requests to assist with our Diameter-RADIUS Gateway.
It’s really became a very common scenario, the System Integrator is deploying NGN infrastructure that comes equipped with Diameter connectivity and in is network he has legacy equipment that is sitting there for many years (and will stay for many years more) and supports only legacy connectivity (i.e. RADIUS) and now the System Integrator needs to connect the two protocols.
And of course Diameter and RADIUS are different protocols and cannot be bridged.

I stumbled across an initial work by the IETF Dime group- draft-zorn-dime-radia-gate-00.txt, really in early stages, not even a draft yet, driven by Lionel Morend and Glen Zorn.
Glen is really one of the major forces behind Diameter for many years (I still don’t understand why the blessed CMS related work driven by him wasn’t standardized)

It’s an interesting case where the standard bodies (the technical guys, flying in the air with no commercial weights to reality ) are behind the network adoption and the market need. Usually it’s the other way, for example LTE was standardized and until we will see real deployments it will be a few more years.
But in this case the standard bodies are behind, maybe because we live in a non standard world and the migration to NGN is evolution and not revolution, and RADIUS and Diameter need to co-exist for many years. Anyway this is blessed and very important work, and is based on real market need.