RADIUS attributes are used to define specific authentication, authorization, and accounting (AAA) elements in a user profile, which is stored on the RADIUS daemon. With this release, the following RADIUS attributes are introduced in cnBNG:

• Session-Timeout : You can use this IETF attribute to disconnect a subscriber after the specified time expires.

• Filter-Id : This IETF attribute can be used to specify a filter or access control policy to be applied to a user's session.

• vrf-id : This Cisco attribute-value pair (AVP) can be used to specify the virtual routing and forwarding (VRF) instance ID for the subscriber.

• user-plane-ip-address : In Broadband Network Gateway (physical BNG) deployments, the IP address of the User Plane Function (UPF) is typically available in the nas-ip attribute of the RADIUS Access-Request or Accounting-Request messages. However, in cloud native BNG deployments, the nas-ip attribute carries the IP address of the cnBNG itself, rather than the specific UPF.

  To address this issue, the Cisco AVP user-plane-ip-address is used to carry the UPF IP address in the RADIUS messages. This attribute enables the awareness of the UPF IP address in the policy plane during cnBNG migration.

For more information, see the Cloud Native BNG Control Plane Configuration Guide > Authentication, Authorization, and Accounting Functions chapter, and Radius Attributes chapter.

You can now deploy the cnBNG cluster using the Inception server alone. You do not require the SMI Cluster Manager, which was previously used along with the Inception server to deploy the cnBNG cluster. This enhancement can help you save on hardware resources (servers).

For more information, see the Cloud Native BNG Control Plane Configuration Guide > cnBNG Installation and Configuration chapter.