Tuesday, May 24, 2022

More flexibility to authentication with Ut interface and Radiator GBA/BSF Pack

One of the carrier products in our Radiator product line is the Radiator GBA/BSF Pack. The main use case for this product has been providing the authentication for VoLTE supplementary services in carrier networks and Radiator GBA/BSF Pack has been in this use for many years. 

In addition to self-provisioning VoLTE supplementary services (call forwarding, call barring, knocking, etc.) the same GBA/BSF functionalities can be used for proxying authentication to different services as well - such as Rich Communication Services or different services for IoT devices, for example.

The main functionality in GBA/BSF is that after the initial authentication, end user authentication can be proxied directly to Application Specific servers via Ut interface. The basic architecture is shown on the diagram below.


The Ut interface and authentication proxying can also be used for example in secure IoT authentication for different products, such as IoT devices that need to be authorised and authenticated. In this use case as well, the IoT device is supplied with SIM/eSIM that authenticates with carrier HSS. After the initial authentication, the later authentications can be proxied using the Authentication Proxy provided by Radiator GBA/BSF Pack.  

Radiator provides flexibility when working with Ut interface

For Ut interface, there is a wide range of different vendor specific implementations from device manufacturers. This causes differences in user equipment behaviour across vendors.

This is where Radiator GBA/BSF shows its strengths: wide interoperability accommodating different user equipment within the same systems makes our Radiator GBA/BSF easy to integrate to different network environments. Radiator GBA/BSF’s implementation allows tweaking the configuration when unexpected behaviour is encountered and adjust accordingly.

This focus to accommodate multiple vendor-specific implementations is what we have been doing in recent releases of Radiator GBA/BSF Pack - latest release in April 2022: providing more interoperability based on real observed behaviour of the devices. In this development work, the feedback from our live carrier customer has been extremely valuable.

Would you like to know more?

If you would like to know more about Radiator GBA/BSF and how it can be used in your use case, please contact our team at info(a)radiatorsoftware.com