(RADIATOR) DIAMETER dying?

[Hugh Irvine]

Hi Dave -

As always there is a healthy dose of "if it isn't broken, don't fix it" 
associated with the RADIUS protocol - it really is quite remarkable how 
simple and useful a protocol it is. That said there are a number of 
serious shortcomings with the RADIUS protocol that DIAMETER seeks to 
address, including greatly expanded header fields and attribute fields 
and much stricter control over attribute use. DIAMETER is also designed 
to use reliable, encrypted transport and this is important for some 
people. I also personally feel that the EAP extensions to RADIUS are an 
ugly kludge at best.

In my recent travels I have seen increasing interest in Diameter and I 
also saw my first equipment that implements a DIAMETER client (an 
Ericsson service gateway device). My expectation is that all the 
equipment vendors are working on DIAMETER clients and we will start to 
see code appearing during the course of this year.

I imagine that we will see RADIUS/DIAMETER translation gateways as the 
first products to be introduced, as this sort of operation will allow 
existing RADIUS implementations to be used unchanged, with DIAMETER 
being used for the "core network" within a providers infrastructure 
(somewhat analogous to IPv6 deployment).

I also imagine that many current RADIUS users will continue to use 
RADIUS quite happily, as it meets their needs perfectly well. I expect 
to see DIAMETER being used in new, large projects where its features 
provide the solutions to problems like secure, reliable transport, 
"automatic" service location discovery, expanded accounting 
capabilities, and enhanced attribute use. The projects that fit into 
this category that I have seen are mainly large-scale roaming 
initiatives in academia and/or government. There is also some interest 
in large-scale corporate intranets too.

So, no I don't think that DIAMETER is dying, but I also don't think it 
is going to replace every single existing RADIUS installation any time 
soon either.

As you already know, we are actively working on raDiameter currently 
and we have a number of beta-testers who have expressed interest in 
testing the early code with a view to deploying experimental DIAMETER 
servers sometime later this year.

If you have any further questions or comments please feel free to post 
them.

I have copied this mail to Mike for his comments, and I would be 
interested in everyone else's views as well.

regards

Hugh



On 1 Mar 2005, at 23:18, Dave Kitabjian wrote:

> Hey folks,
>
> I was chatting with the good folks at O’Reilly (http://www.ora.com) as 
> to whether they had any plans to produce a book on DIAMETER. Their 
> impression was that DIAMETER was dying, if not dead.
>
> I have also noticed that www.diameter.org has been offline for some 
> time. Still, I know you guys are producing raDiameter, and I pointed 
> them to your website.
>
>  Does anyone want to comment on where that technology stands and what 
> might be the issues affecting its success and adoption?
>
> Thanks,
>
> Dave
>

NB: I am travelling this week, so there may be delays in our 
correspondence.

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