NowWAP, Radius Accounting and MSISDN headers

Posted by on Oct 21, 2008 in Support Blog

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NowWAP was recently updated over the summer months to address an issue on heavily loaded systems where Radius packets could be lost. NowWAP uses these Radius accounting packets in order to determine the identity (phone number or MSISDN) associated with the device that is making a request. NowWAP includes the phone number in an X-MSISDN header when forwarding the request to a downstream content server, which enables content server, such as an MMSC to identify the subscriber.

On extremely busy systems, NowWAP was not processing Radius requests quickly enough, which could cause some packets to be lost, resulting in rejected connections.

This problem was corrected in the 2008.06.03 release of NowWAP, which is currently available for download at http://www.nowwap.com/.

More information about how to configure NowWAP and the NowSMS MMSC to use a Radius accounting feed can be found at https://nowsms.com/support/bulletins/tb-nowsms-002.htm.

Additional information about configuring a Radius accounting feed in a fault tolerant and/or load balanced installation of multiple NowWAP servers can be found at https://nowsms.com/nowwap-in-fault-tolerant-or-redundant-load-balanced-environment.

For comments and further discussion, please click here to visit the NowSMS Technical Forums (Discussion Board)...

2 Responses to “NowWAP, Radius Accounting and MSISDN headers”

  1. Anonymous says:

    I have a question about inserting msisdn in the headers. Why not just rely on the msisdn received in the “from” of the mms message itself?

    newbie here…

  2. Bryce Norwood says:

    Because the MSISDN is not present in the “From” field of the MMS message when it is received at the MMSC.

    The actual MMS message that is received by the MMSC from the phone has a from field of “insert-address-token”.

    If you think about it … this makes sense … someone with rogue software on a device (or modem) could put in any “From” field that they wanted.

    This is why the MMSC needs to identify the user based upon network credentials.