WilmaGate: a new open access gateway for hotspot management

Wireless access has already become a ubiquitous way to connect to the Internet, but the mushrooming of wireless access infrastructures throughout the world has given rise to a wide range of user authentication, authorization and accounting (AAA) mechanisms, with lots of incompatible "standards", each having its unique features and responding to specific problems.The WilmaGate system has been developed in order to provide a viable alternative to such a scenario. The assumptions that led to this system are very simple. First, wireless users are often already registered to some traditional access provider, or to an institution: rather than requiring a different subscription to each wireless access system, we just require the subscriber's service provider or institution to collaborate with the access system for user authentication. Second, users should not be forced to install specialized clients into their computers for two reasons: their systems would grow unstable and some types of computers (e.g., PDAs) would not be able to access the network. Third, security for e-mail and passwords is mainly provided by end-to-end protocols such as SSL and TLS, so introducing low-level authentication and encryption can be regarded as unnecessary, and causes often unnecessary overhead.In this work we oversee the system architecture, which has already been deployed, and describe its main component, the WilmaGate. A short discussion on the current system implementation and its performance is also provided.