AA RADIUS accounting provides per- level, AA subscriber charging group statistics as well as application-group (AG) and application statistics as part of the RADIUS accounting infrastructure. The primary use of this is to enhance RADIUS accounting with AA information useful for usage-based billing plans, providing flexibility to charge and rate application content using IP subnets, HTTP URLs, SIP URIs, and other AA-identified applications.
The system can export AA accounting statistics using accounting policy records exported with RADIUS accounting. For non-DSM subscribers, AA RADIUS accounting is AA subscriber ID-based, where the AA subscriber context IPv4 and IPv6 host addresses for the sub are not reflected in RADIUS accounting. For DSM subscribers, the AA counters are included in the BB RADIUS session which is based on the BB sub and reflects the BB host context.
AA RADIUS accounting is implemented using ALU Vendor Specific Attributes (VSAs). This provides all charging group counters for a subscriber to be exported with a common accounting session ID. The following statistics are included in each record. Accounting values are for forwarded packets:
input octets (from-sub)
input packets (from-sub)
output octets (to-sub)
output packets (to-sub)
AA RADIUS accounting is supported for ESM, DSM, transit, and SAP or spoke SDP AA-subtypes. RADIUS accounting is used to export AA charging group, app-group, and application values according to the RADIUS accounting policy interval. Charging group statistics are exported in RADIUS accounting independent of application groups (either or both can be enabled).
For DSM subscribers, RADIUS accounting records can be configured to be exported under the Broadband ISA (BB) configuration. In this case, the AA charging group, application group, application and sub aggregate (total AA traffic) counters are passed to the BB ISA for export to the BB RADIUS accounting sessions.