AAA framework for aeronautical passenger multicast communication

IP multicast can be used for one-to-many or many-to-many communications providing efficient resource consumption. When providing IP services to passengers on a plane via a satellite, IP multicasting techniques can be very useful in saving resources over the satellite. A novel framework (MSECAAA) presented in [1], combines the IETF multicast security architecture with efficient AAA techniques enabling the network provider to directly control access to multicast sessions and account the usage of the multicast services. This paper first describes in detail the network architecture and the system design for providing multicast services to aeronautical passengers and then describes how the MSEC-AAA may be extended and used to provide efficient IP multicast services to aeronautical passengers. The paper also describes the post-paid and pre-paid accounting mechanism that may be used by the Aircraft Network Provider to account the multicast usage.