RADIUS Client Integration in SMF

The SMF consists of loosely coupled microservices. The microservice decomposition is based on the following three-layered architecture:

  1. Layer 1—Protocol and Load Balancer services (stateless)

  2. Layer 2—Application services (stateless)

  3. Layer 3—Database services (stateful)

The Protocol layer integrates with the RADIUS Client POD.

The following figure illustrates the integration of RADIUS Client in SMF.

RADIUS Client Integration

Radius-EP App (RADIUS-Client POD)—The RADIUS Client functionality is added in a new POD. It handles RADIUS protocol-specific functions such as authentication and accounting.

SMF Service App (SMF Service POD)—The SMF Service App provides PDU session service. During session establishment, the SMF service decides if the secondary authentication is required or not, and acts accordingly.

UDP-Proxy App (UDP-Proxy POD)—The UDP-Proxy App is enabled with host-networking and, sends and receives packets using external Virtual-IPs. All RADIUS packets are transmitted and received from an outside cluster using this application.