What is EAP

IP multicast mechanisms provide efficient bandwidth consumption and distribution of high volume contents such as audio/video streaming, audio/video-on-demand and file sharing to multiple users. To commercially deploy multicast services in next generation networks it is important for Network Providers (NPs) to be able to control user access to the multicast content and to be able to account the multicast usage. This chapter compares some of the existing security mechanisms and highlights their inadequacies for providing efficient multicast security. The chapter then describes an AAA framework for IP multicast, which combines the IETF MSEC architecture with efficient AAA techniques to provide secure multicast content and to enable NPs to authenticate, authorise and provide efficient access control of end users requesting multicast content. This AAA framework also supports both post-paid and pre-paid accounting of users and allows the monitoring of session information like session duration and data volume for each multicast session.