System Controller
The OSC is an industry-leading implementation of a complete authentication, policy decision and roaming manager. The OSC is deployed stand-alone or in pairs for redundancy, serving Orbyte Access Gateways or third party gateways.
The OSC provides access gateways with both RADIUS-based authentication service and access policies with LDAP, allowing the enforcement of advanced per-subscriber access policies including per-port bandwidth limiting and stateful packet-filtering.
Accounting information, based on RADIUS records - including interim records for near-real time resource managed services – are collected and propagated to the central accounting system for processing. The OSC hosts the resource management framework, keeping track of the status of resource limited (time and/or data volume) services, allowing for refill functionality. All RADIUS traffic between the access gateways and the unit is protected with IPSec to ensure data integrity. Roaming with support for “chargeable user identity” and other emerging industry standard parameters are handled by the OSC.
The OSC implements support for participation in 802.1x authentication chains, relaying requests to designated servers with support for EAP.
The subscriber access environment can be tailored to the subscriber location and service used. Branding packages containing the content are centrally managed through the system console located on the OPCA, distributed to the OSCs and made available to the access gateways when requested by a subscriber.
The problem with stolen access credentials can be expensive for the subscriber, and hard for the operator to track down. All OSCs in an Orbyte system participate in a distributed session tracking system called the Active Users (AU) system. The AU system works by limiting the number of simultaneous sessions using the same account to a configurable number, and logging all attempts to over-utilize accounts.