Overview

There are, however, some cases when an external web portal server requires total control of a user session by requesting authentication on the user’s behalf as well as terminating user sessions. JSON interface defined in this reference guide provides a standard way for an external web portal server to communicate with the controller for this kind of usage.

The following are the hotspot components and their roles in the hotspot portal as seen in the Figure 1

• Northbound: Listens on the control and management interface. It is responsible for handling requests from external subscriber portal and authenticates with the AAA server.
• Captive portal: It is responsible for providing a wall garden for web-proxy UE. It blocks UEs which uses user agents that are listed in the configured black-list and mainly handles high scalable redirecting UEs to the external subscriber portal.
• External subscriber portal: It is a web service. The user sends his/her login credentials (username and password) through this portal. The authentication is performed through the northbound by user input credential. The external subscriber portal can reach the northbound depending on the type of interface it can reach such as control interface, management interface or both.
• AAA server: It is responsible for authenticating the UE through the UE’s login credentials (username and password).

Hotspot portal components

This reference guide describes the controller RESTful-like/JSON interfaces for external web portal servers.