Hi,

I shall try to answer some of these questions below.

Regards,

..//steve

"Kumar, Vineet" wrote:

Stephen,

I have a couple of questions on your contribution MTD-016. These are:

1. H.323 already has mechanisms for discovering the gatekeeper. Are you suggesting in your contribution that the terminal should discover the VLF instead of the visiting gatekeeper ? Or, are you assuming that the VLF is integrated in the visiting gatekeeper ?

This can be discussed - I was of the opionion that we should discover the VLF and send the registration to the home environment after that. However, we haven´t agreed on the role of the VLF, and visited gatekeeper, home gatekeerp and HLF - when we come to agree on what these are, my proposal may change.

2. In H.323, authentication of the terminal and the gatekeeper is done at the time of discovery. In fact, in H.323 all messages between the terminal and the gatekeeper can be authenticated and the message integrity preserved. In your contribution, authentication is done at the time of registration. Why is this preferable to what is already in H.323 ?

I would be interested to understand which gatekeeper you were considering should do the authentication. I would assume that the real authentication would have to be done at home - as such it would be necessary to find the visited network services, and then register/authenticate at home.

3. What is the reason for the information flow from the HLF to the home gatekeeper, and from the home gatekeeperr to the HLF ? I don't think we can assume that there is only one home gatekeeper that the terminal may be using. In fact, the home gatekeeper may not have any information about the user.

I certainly don´t assume that there is only one home gatekeeper. I assume that there will be a number of home gatekeepers, but perhaps only one (or few) HLFs. In this case, we need an function to select the gatekeeper that the user is going to camp on - and this may depend on load, subscriber profile, policy - or a lot of things.

Regards, vineet