Deactivating Service Sessions Using RADIUS

Setting Time or Volume Thresholds for a Service

You can set a threshold for the session by including one or both of the following attributes in the RADIUS record:

Note: The Service-Timeout and Service-Volume attributes use values captured by the Service Manager statistics feature to determine when a threshold is exceeded. Therefore, you must configure and enable statistics collection to use these attributes. See Configuring Service Manager Statistics.

• Service-Timeout—The number of seconds that the service session is active. You can specify a number in the range 0–16777215. Values greater than 16777215 are recycled, starting from the initial value of 0. For example, if you specify the value for Service-Timeout VSA as 16777218, this value is equivalent to 2 for this VSA. A value of 0 indicates that the session never times out. A particular Service-Timeout VSA can be used by a maximum of 2000 services.

  The service-timeout threshold accuracy is within 30 seconds of the specified value.

• Service-Volume—The total number of MB of traffic that can use the service session. You can specify a number in the range 0–16777215 MB. Values greater than 16777215 are recycled, starting from the initial value of 0. A value of 0 indicates that there is no limit to the amount of traffic for the session. For example, if you specify the value for Service-Timeout and Service-Volume VSAs as 16777216 and 16777217, these values are equivalent to 0 and 1 respectively for these VSAs. A particular Service-Volume VSA can be used by a maximum of 1000 services.

  Note: Service Manager terminates a session when the output byte count exceeds the configured service-volume threshold. The output byte count is captured by the output-stat-clacl string in the classifier list variable that you configure to collect statistics. See Configuring Service Manager Statistics.

  The service-volume threshold accuracy is based on a 10-second period. Service Manager does not immediately deactivate a service session when the output byte count reaches the service-volume threshold. Instead, Service Manager checks the volume in 10-second intervals and deactivates a service session at the end of the 10-second period in which the output byte count reaches the volume threshold. For example, if a threshold is reached 4seconds into the 10-second interval, the session continues for the remaining 6 seconds in the measuring period and is then terminated. Therefore, the total volume equals the threshold plus the volume during the additional 6 seconds.

When the output byte count reaches the threshold, RADIUS deactivates the service session. You must use tags to associate threshold attributes with the Activate-Service attribute for the service session.

Using the Deactivate-Service Attribute

You can also include the Deactivate-Service attribute in the subscriber’s RADIUS record. The format for this attribute is the same as the format of the Activate-Service attribute—the name of the service, including parameters. The Deactivate-Service attribute is used by RADIUS CoA messages, such as in a guided entrance service. See Example: Guided Entrance Service Definition for more information.