Simple Gateway Control Protocol

[Christian Huitema <[e-mail]>]

During the past months, the Internet telephony team at Bellcore has been
working on a protocol for controlling "simple" telephone gateways. The
SGCP assumes a call control architecture where the call control
'intelligence' is outside the gateways and handled by external call
control elements, the "call agents."  The specification of this protocol
are now available as an internet draft:

	Title		: Simple Gateway Control Protocol (SGCP)
	Author(s)	: C. Huitema, M. Arango
	Filename	: draft-huitema-sgcp-v1-00.txt
	Pages		: 54
	Date		: 15-May-98

Note that SGCP is not in competition with H.323, or SIP, but mostly
complementary.  In our approach, the signalling functions such as SS7,
H.323 or SIP are handled by the call agent, which is seen by these systems
as an SSP, a Gatekeeper or a SIP relay.  SGCP is then use to "program the
gateways" in sync with the signalling decision.

We believe that this protocol "fills a niche."  In fact, we hope that it
can become the basis for an open standard, so that call agents developed
by multiple providers can interact with gateways from different providers.
 We are also aware of the status of the MMUSIC working group, and are
definitely not proposing to conduct any such work within that group.  In
fact, we have set-up an open mailing list for the discussion of SGCP.

Please send mail to [e-mail] for subscription
requests to the mailing list, [e-mail].  This is an open mailing
list.

The mailing list archive is accessible from the Internet by anonymous ftp
to ftp.bellcore.com.  The archive file is kept in /pub/Group.archive/sgcp
directory, under the file name "archive".


-- 
Christian Huitema
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