Abstract
Public WLAN (PWLAN) stands a predominant position to embrace the wireless broadband era. Under the B3G vision, cellular operators (like Vodafone, T-Mobile) construct such a complementary environment to supplement the limited data access service (like GPRS or UMTS). Additionally, confederating sprinkled PWLAN operators under the WLAN roaming agreements can intensify the PWLAN service coverage. Therefore, lots of RADIUS-based Authentication, Authorization and Accounting (AAA) messages traverse among pan-PWLAN operators including PWLAN operators, Cellular/PWLAN operators and WLAN roaming brokers. In this article, we aim to improve the message forwarding lookup latency by a hashing-based scheme against the traditional one by a linear scheme. For the collision resolution in hashing, we use the customer bases of different partners as weights to construct a descending chained list to eliminate the overhead. Simulation results depict that the proposed scheme can effectively decrease the consumed time of deciding how to forward messages compared to the conventional approach. © 2006 IEEE.