A new interprovider interconnect technology for multimedia networks

This article describes a new method of enabling interprovider connectivity: disaggregating the application level gateway, or signaling function, from the media firewall, or packet handling function. Simulation results based on real-world traffic situations indicate that the processing required for handling signaling in multimedia networks depends much more on topology than the bandwidth of the media streams associated with the signaling. Thus, it is compelling to use an architecture that independently scales the signaling and media processing capacity of the interprovider interconnect for multimedia networks.