Distributed gatekeeper architecture for H.323-based multimedia telephony

This paper proposes to facilitate the inter-gatekeeper communications with distributed gatekeeper architecture through acquiring knowledge of the destinations served by other GKs dynamically, of cache management, and of extension of the existing H.323 signaling messages. The only new field that needs to be added to extend the signaling message set is hopCount in order to avoid looping, especially in distributive environment similar to messages of Recommendation H.225.0 Annex G. The existing two fields defined in H.323v2 that need to be added to all signaling message sets are endpointType and gatekeeperIdentifier. This simple extension in the H.323 signaling message set will satisfy the needs for inter-gatekeeper communications.