Build SIP-based VOIP Service With RADIUS AAA Using Kamailio (OpenSER) And FreeRadius

OpenSER (http://www.kamailio.org) is a scalable and flexible SIP (RFC3261) server with a lot of features that can power your VoIP services. Features like ENUM lookup, TLS support, authentication, authorization and accounting against database or Radius servers, least cost routing, load balancing or Call Processing Language allow providing residential or carrier VoIP services.

FreeRADIUS (http://www.freeradius.org) is an open source RADIUS server.It scales from embedded systems with small amounts of memory, to systems with millions of users. It is fast, flexible, configurable, and supports many authentication servers.

This document focuses on configuring FreeRadius to offer AAA services to OpenSER SIP server, needed for VoIP services. Step by step configuration is provided and you must be logged in as 'root' user to be able to execute the commands exampled in this document. It is assumed that you have basic knowledge about Linux or Debian operation and administration.

Communication between VoIP users (phones) and the server uses the SIP (RFC3261) protocol. The SIP server will communicate with the AAA server via radius client, which is linked to the SIP server. Users' profile can be stored to the local file system (as it is done is the examples included in this document) or other storage system supported by AAA server (e.g., database, ldap).

    +---------+                                              +---------+
    | PHONE 1 |<--SIP--+    +-------------------+            | STORAGE |
    +---------+        |    |    SIP SERVER     |            +----+----+
                       #===>|     (OpenSER)     |                 |        
    ...........        |    |-------------------|         +-------+-------+
                       |    |   RADIUS CLIENT   |<==AAA==>| RADIUS SERVER |
    +---------+        |    | (radiusclient-ng) |         |  (FreeRADIUS) |
    | PHONE N |<--SIP--+    +-------------------+         +---------------+
    +---------+

FreeRadius server is part of official Debian distribution. To install it just do:

	~# apt-get install freeradius

If you install FreeRadius from Debian packages, the configuration files are located in “/etc/freeradius/”.

If you prefer to install FreeRadius from sources, then go to FreeRadius web site and download it from there. Please note that next commands are the basic steps to install FreeRadius from source - you should read FreeRadius installation documentation to do it properly.

    ~# mkdir -p /usr/local/src/freeradius
    ~# cd /usr/local/src/freeradius
    ~# wget ftp://ftp.freeradius.org/pub/radius/freeradius-1.1.0.tar.gz
    ~# tar xvfz freeradius-1.1.0.tar.gz
    ~# cd freeradius-1.1.0
    ~# ./configure
    ~# make
    ~# make install

If you install FreeRadius from sources, the configuration files are located in “/usr/local/raddb/”.

To compile the Radius support in OpenSER you must install first the “radiusclient-ng” library.