Unified solution to registration, authentication and billing for wireless hotspots: Architecture and protocols

There are tremendous needs for wireless connectivity in public places such as airports, libraries, cafes, and conference venues. However, some technical, deployment and business problems need to be addressed before such connectivity can be provided transparently and ubiquitously via wireless hotspots. These problems include registration, authentication, proper infrastructure, billing, and interoperability. In this paper, we present a simple, practical and unified solution to eliminating the users' heavy burden in complex registration and configuration, repeated authentications, different user IDs and passwords, and multiple billings in spite of accessing wireless hotspots provided by different hotspot providers in different cities. Our key idea is to create a central hotspot authority to administrate and regulate hotspots. Moreover, based on the central hotspot authority, we propose a unified architecture and two protocols namely registration and authentication protocol and billing protocol. With our solution, all the problems mentioned above will be successfully solved.