A configuration of location free network applicable to location dependent services

By using a dynamic VLAN feature of recent network equipment, we can configure a location-free network environment which can authenticate a user of a terminal and assign a VLAN for his/her terminal dynamically so that the user can connect his/her terminal to the same VLAN anywhere in the organization. However, on such a location-free network environment, it is difficult to use some location dependent services. One typical location dependent service is site license of an electronic journal (e-journal) that users can access the contents only if they are in specific locations. In this paper, we propose configuration of a location free network which can adapt location dependent services by devising the allocation of the VLAN-IDs and the subnet IP addresses. By this method, since no special equipment is required, it is possible to build a network system without extra cost. We configured the network system based on the proposed method on the campus network of Okayama University and confirmed the effectiveness and the practicability on accessing some site-licensed e-journals.