Recently, we have seen a significant increase in demand for our Wifi Offloading solutions and services. Many mobile operators are aiming for increased use of their own existing wifi infrastructure or the use of wifi infrastructure provided by 3rd party partners. This is done in many cases to expand especially indoor coverage in areas where 5G infrastructure has its limitations.
With Radiator, the essential product is Radiator SIM Pack that provides the integration between key components in wifi network and mobile core for WiFi Offloading. In this blog, we are clarifying how this kind of concept can be easily evaluated in different networks - as we are currently engaged heavily in these kinds of projects.
How Wifi Offloading Proof of Concept can be implemented?
For this kind of Wifi Offloading Proof of Concept (POC), a small number of steps are needed.
Firstly, you will need access to relevant wifi controllers / access gateways, in order to configure the RADIUS traffic to be configured towards Radiator SIM Pack. With this, seamless SIM authentication (with EAP-SIM/EAP-AKA/EAP-AKA’ for example) can be implemented.
As a next step, you will need to install the evaluation version from relevant Radiator packages: Radiator AAA Server Software, Radiator Carrier Module and Radiator SIM Module, along with the UtilXS component. The packages exist for all recent versions of RedHat based systems, Ubuntu and Debian.
After the installation, our team will provide you with the necessary configuration in order to configure traffic towards your subscriber data source. For HSS, Diameter SWx interface is the standard. Radiator can also use Diameter S6d, Cx or Wx interfaces. When using HLR, Radiator connects with GSM MAP with SIGTRAN. If the subscriber data is stored in more than one location, Radiator can authenticate SIMs from multiple backends. SIM authentication uses IMSI, and Radiator can optionally fetch user MSISDN (phone number) for billing purposes.
Lastly, you will need to have access to the carrier profiles for the mobile phones or other end user devices so that automatic wifi authentication can be done. The methods for this differ a bit with Android and iOS devices: for Android, there are developer tools available for your own testing. For iOS, you need assistance from Apple. For both cases, we are happy to provide assistance.
As can be seen, successful WiFi Offload POC requires a bit of cooperation internally in the organization of the mobile operator. However, at the same time the needed configuration is typically something that can be done with limited effort - and with the assistance from us. As we have already deployed tens of successful WiFi offloading and VoWiFi installations, most challenges (and how to overcome them) are familiar to us.
What are the next steps?
If you are interested in WiFi offloading, please do not hesitate to contact us. Please fill out our contact form or contact sales@radiatorsoftware.com, and we are happy to help you with the next steps.
