Benefits and Advantages of the Routing Server

Traditional TDM based networks have always been built with a hierarchical structure. The primary reason for building in this fashion was the cost for long distance leased lines, traffic to and from exchanges in a region or country to another region or country needed to be concentrated via transit exchanges.

A secondary effect was the ease of administration as only the transit exchanges needed information about other exchanges in the network.

With IP-networking, once an exchange is connected to the wide area IP-infrastructure, all exchanges can be reached directly which improves call set up times and avoids the use of resources in other exchanges (transits). Unfortunately, to utilize these benefits of IP networking, all exchanges in the complete network needs access to information about all other exchanges. A rough calculation of the management effort for a real customer case landed at some 1 million command line entries (MML commands) for the whole network. This is simply an impossible task.

The purpose of the Routing Server is to allow the configuration of an optimal network solution which utilizes the advantages of IP-networking.

With the Routing Server application, only one exchange in the network needs to be programmed with all data (or a few, if loadsharing and redundancy is required).

For the customer case mentioned above, the Routing Server needed roughly 4000 command line entries.

An additional benefit with the Routing Server application, compared with our competitors centralized gatekeeper solutions, is the fact that all routing data is automatically downloaded to each exchange in the network, thus providing full autonomy with possibility to reroute failed calls over alternate networks, for example, a PSTN, in situations where an exchange is isolated due to failed access to the IP network.