Design and Implementation of SOAP Manageable Access Control Gateways

With the prevailing wireless network nowadays, more and more network devices such as firewalls, gateways, and wireless access points are set up in hotels, coffee shops, schools and stores to provide Internet access services. In addition to manage users using network services, it is also an important issue to maintain and control all these distributed network devices.

In this thesis we combine Captive Portal technique in the access control gateway with a web server on the Internet to achieve a more flexible authentication mechanism and manage users in the network. Besides, IP Plug and Play (IP PnP) function will be added to the gateway for the convenience of use.

In addition, considering that many commerce popular Wide Area Network (WAN) devices management protocols like CPE WAN Management Protocol (CWMP) use Simple Object Access Protocol (SOAP) to carry out the transmission of information, we modify the gateway to be a SOAP manageable access control gateway. This means by supporting SOAP protocol, our gateway can be configured and controlled by a management server along with other gateways in different kinds of platforms or developed in different programming languages via the Internet simultaneously.

The goal of this thesis is to provide a flexible network access control gateway which can be applied to large-scale wireless users and devices management. The gateway is not only a controller itself to do the authentication and manage clients in LAN but also can be configured and controlled by a management server via WAN. With the SOAP supported function in the gateway, the management server can solve the problems which are difficult for the gateway to handle by itself, achieve vast and complicated configuration via the Internet remotely. Therefore, services providers can carry out long-distance centralized management within a common management framework and control many different devices in batches efficiently and systematically.