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Mobile services are proliferating. With this come both benefits and problems. The MaD Challenge team has identified a way to help both minimizing the problems and maximizing the benefits. Introducing standards-based directory services into mobile infrastructures will provide Customers and Vendors alike with considerable payback.

The MaD Challenge is a direct consequence of the Business Scenario: The Executive on the Move which was developed by The Open Group. It was initiated to explore the technology potential and business benefits of utilizing standards-based directory services to support mobile environments. The Open Group was joined by the Distributed Management Task Force (DMTF) and the Network Applications Consortium (NAC). These three organizations, whose members include many prominent vendors and users of information processing and communication products, have joined together to explore the use of Directories to support Mobile Computing.

Customer Benefits

The growth of mobile technologies, especially Wireless LANS (WLAN) and "hotspots" and the standardization work undertaken in the IEEE through advances in 2.5 (and some 3)G implementations points to the benefits derived from the customers of these technologies. As was stated in the Business Scenario:

"Mobile Computing and Communications are increasingly used by Executives and other employees of a wide range of government, commercial, manufacturing, service, and other organizations. They help to:

• Minimize time when people are not doing productive, profitable work;
• Maximize Availability of Executives for Decision Making;
• Maximize Competitive Advantage by Timely Availability of Information; and
• Improve Quality of Enterprise Information."

Efforts are even underway to allow for roaming between technology networks, which would allow the customer even more flexibility.

In the telephony side of the business, suppliers have had agreements and arrangements in place to allow the customer, with relative ease (at least within the physical boundaries of a country), to roam while maintaining a single point of Administration, Authorization and Accounting (AAA). This, however, is not true in either the pure WLAN or between WLANs and Mobile telephony networks.

The Problems

The Challenge, thus far has identified two areas of difficulty in effecting the seamless movement of customers through all the varying wireless technologies. These are:

1. Seamless network handover maintaining session persistence
2. Network Administration, Authorization and Accounting

Vendor Benefits

In anecdotal discussions with service and equipment suppliers, the technology problem of the seamless handover is, today, not a great problem. There doesn’t seem to be a major market requirement for it (yet).

The second problem – allowing a user to roam between networks while maintaining a single identity – appears to be of much more interest, especially to Wireless Internet Service Suppliers (WISPS). Here is where the Challenge will demonstrate the benefits of standards-based directory support for the AAA functions.

If a customer of one service has the ability to use the same credentials in numerous environments and can receive one bill, he or she is much more likely to use more services overall because of the ease of use, ease of administration and ease of payment.

The Challenge has taken a step to facilitate this task by developing an architecture that utilizes a standards-based Lightweight Directory Access Protocol (LDAP) schema to accumulate the necessary information and make it available for validation, authorization or accumulation by the appropriate suppliers.

In effect, the benefits to the vendors include:

• the ability to federate identities for authentication and authorization – the user has a single identity that is used in multiple services
• the ability to accumulate usage/billing information in a standard format that can be passed amongst the participating services
• the ability to administer the users and pass standards-based formatted information between services in close to real-time
• higher volumes of usage across-the-board because of customer ease of use
• a simple audit mechanism for tracking usage of non-native customers
• all the benefits of the cellular HLR (Home Location Register) in a cost-effective, standards-based, well understood technology

Challenge Partners

The Open Group

Distributed Management Task Force

Network Applications Consortium