Advanced RADIUS integrates security issues and supports authentication and accounting from Livingston formatted text files and databases. Supported database connections are ODBC, Oracle and MySQL. It incorporates increased security into the database by using encrypted passwords in users' text profiles. Supported encryptions are MD3, MD5, and TEXT (no encryption) and password authentication from local system shadow file is also supported. You can use Password-Authentication Protocol (PAP) or Challenge Handshake Authentication Protocol (CHAP) for user-password authentication type and at the same time, time-based authentication and authorization of users is also supported. Furthermore, Advanced RADIUS is fully configurable for use with your own choice check-reply attributes for authentication-authorization and custom-attribute selection for accounting.

You can also configure Advanced RADIUS to store online users' sessions or active sessions. An active session record may be kept in a database or in Advanced RADIUS's internal structure. Advanced RADIUS uses these active sessions to track online users' status and to control simultaneous multi-sessions. Session records are stored temporarily by default, i.e. a session record of a user is deleted when the user disconnects or stops using the service. Advanced RADIUS can also be configured to store these records in a permanent storage (database / accounting log file).

Another far reaching benefit of Advanced RADIUS is that it supports realm based authentication and accounting which it performs by selecting a realm from user-name@realm-name. This 'realm-name' is used to handle an authentication and accounting request from the 'user-name' if the realm is defined in RADIUS configurations, otherwise a default authentication/accounting handler will be used to process the request.

Advanced RADIUS can also be deployed in a large scale network using multiple-vendors' equipment that in turn work as RADIUS-clients. You can handle authentication, authorization and accounting (AAA) differently for each of your NAS equipments simultaneously with same server configurations. Such a distributed handling of NAS equipments (RADIUS clients) with a centralized server provides a great deal of localized management and stability.

Advanced RADIUS enables you to allow/restrict multiple logins with same user information. Advanced RADIUS can be configured to specify a default maximum multi-session and/or user-specific multi-session attribute. By default, a user's login name is the only attribute identifying multiple sessions of the same user and a set of attributes have to be configured in order to create a unique user-login.

Advanced RADIUS can also be configured to authenticate users by using their calling numbers or by using the MAC address of the user's equipment. This technique is usually used for wireless authentication.

VoIP gateways from different vendors have different authentication schemes. For example, Cisco AS5300 has two authentication policies for VoIP, which are PIN system and PIN-less system. Similarly Quintum gateways support ANI authentication, PIN based authentication, account based authentication and mix of PIN and account based authentication. Advanced RADIUS can be configured with any authentication scheme including the ones mentioned above for users' authentication. See your gateways documentation for more information about related policies.

ARS can be configured to record Call Details Records (CDRs) / Accounting information in multiple databases/text-files in a redundant or backup fashion. In case of redundancy, ARS writes records in all the configured accounting handlers. In case of backup, it writes CDR information in the first accounting handler only, but if it fails (due to database crashing, input/Output errors or lost connection to database error) then the subsequent accounting handler records the CDR.

Different ISP billing software have different methods of storing user information in their databases. Some billing software use one record per table to store user information for authentication by RADIUS, while others use multiple records in a table in attribute-value pair format. Advanced RADIUS can be easily configured with such types of billing software. ARS has numerous installations with Advanced ISP Billing System for Dialup/DSL/PPPoE (now also supportingWi-Fi, WiMax & Triple Play) services and AdvancedVoIP Billing System for VoIP services.

Advanced RADIUS can be readily deployed in a network environment where VoIP gateways or access servers from different vendors are working on centralized authentication using the RADIUS protocol. It can be easily configured to fully serve all multi-vendor gateways with Vendor Specific Attribute (VSA) support.

Advanced RADIUS also supports multi-level logging for RADIUS server packet tracing. Low-level logging is very helpful in identifying configuration errors, when the RADIUS server is not handling requests properly. Following are the log levels in descending order:

1. OFF - No Debugging
2. SEVERE - Only errors
3. WARNiNG - Errors + warnings
4. INFO - Debugging of RADIUS processing. Good for tracing errors
5. ALL - intensive debugging

Log output can be generated on a console or a text file. A low log level has a considerable impact on performance, so it should only be used for testing purposes.

Proxy and roaming service is also provided by Advanced RADIUS Server. You can use Advanced RADIUS as a forwarding proxy server to one or more RADIUS servers for load balancing and roaming support. This feature makes ARS a beneficial choice for large distributed networks.