DIAMETER ADVANTAGES OVER RADIUS

Better Transport Diameter runs over a reliable transport, TCP or SCTP. Lost packets are retransmitted at each hop. A persistent connection with an application-level heartbeat message (called a Watchdog message) supports timely failover. TCP and SCTP adapt to network congestion. Better Proxying Hop-by-hop transport failure detection allows failover to occur at the appropriate place — proxies can locally failover to an alternate next-hop peer. The proxy automatically does retransmission of pending request messages following a failover. An AVP that identifies the ultimate destination allows multiple transactions for a given session to be routed to the same home server. Better Session Control Session management is independent of accounting. Accounting information can be routed to a different server than authentication/authorization messages. Session termination is conveyed by a specific Session-Termination message rather than an Accounting Stop message. The server may initiate a message to request session termination. The server may initiate a message to request re-authentication and/or reauthorization of a user. Better Security Hop-by-hop security is provided using IPsec or TLS. End-to-end security protects the integrity and/or confidentiality of sensitive AVPs through intermediate proxies. OVER