Managing Wireless HotSpots: The Uni-Fy Approach

This paper presents and discusses user, account, and traffic management in a WLAN based HotSpot. The HotSpot is a large WLAN infrastructure at the Faculty of Science of the University of Trento, that uses a novel access management architecture named Uni-Fy developed at the University of Trento, and where roughly 20.000 users can have free access. The management scheme, named Uni-Fy, is based on the concept of Open Access Networks and manages the users access, privileges and traffic based on the users profiles and authentication provided by remote service providers, hence acting as an enabling factor rather than as an autonomous service itself. Finally we provide some measurements and experience based on nearly one year of operation.