Third party registration/group registration

[Francois Audet]

As far as H.323 is concerned, all endpoints are H.323 endpoints. They are
further sub-qualified as either "terminals" or "gateways".
 
The line becomes a little blurr when the physical device we are thinking of
is a telephone set behind some sort of IP PBX or Gateway. That telephone can
even be an H.248-controlled device. You could view the "proxy" as either a
Gateway, an MCU or a terminal, or even a combination of 2 or 3 of them
depending on your personnal preferences. Then there are glitches in the
actual H.245 capabilities to negotiate what these entities can support (I
think we sorted that out for v4).
 
In any case, in H.323 terminology, the "endpoint" is the entity that will
register aliases with the gatekeeper. This alias can be completely abstract
(in which case the numbering plan and mapping to phone numbers themselves
would be provisionned in the gatekeeper), or it can be actual phone numbers.
H.323v4 even allows for registering large ranges of numbers without
explicitly enumerating them (this is useful when you prefer to have the
numbering plan managed in each gateways as opposed to a cental gatekeeper).
 
In the H.323 world, this is not really "third-party" registration since the
H.323 proxy is viewed as the first party (the fact that the media will be on
different devices is irrelevant). That being said, I would imagine that the
same mechanism could be used to register 3rd parties (real H.323 endpoints).
 
In my opinion, I think all possible angles are covered in H.323v4... I
wouldn't like to have even more ways to do registration. If anything, we
should probably look into describing a little better how this is supposed to
work to facilitate interworking with gatekeepers. We did a little bit in v4
(for example on the use of so-called prefixes, E.164 numbers, and private
ISO/IEC 11571 addresses).
 
My 2 cents...
 
----
François AUDET, Nortel Networks
mailto:audet at nortelnetworks.com <mailto:audet at nortelnetworks.com> , tel:+1
408 495 3756

-----Original Message-----
From: Taylor, Tom-PT [NORSE:B901:EXCH] 
Sent: Wednesday, November 29, 2000 10:39 AM
To: ITU-SG16 at MAILBAG.INTEL.COM
Subject: Re: Third party registration/group registration



Accurate terminology is obviously useful, but in this case, at least, it
looks like something people can agree on and then move on.  The more
important point seems to be the underlying distinction in requirements:

 -- register on behalf of H.323 endpoints 
 -- register on behalf of other endpoints 
where I use "other" in the sense that the contact address is associated with
a non-H.323 signalling protocol.  Purity is beside the point here -- it's
the intention of the contact address that matters.  Stating the requirement
in this way makes it obvious that the second requirement includes the need
to state which protocol the endpoints expects to receive.

There is another possibility, of course: use the same mechanism to satisfy
all requirements, and allow for the possibility that the endpoint supports
multiple protocols.  I think the design would be cleaner if we took the
approach: one contact point, one protocol -- even if it meant repeating the
contact information for each protocol a multiprotocol endpoint supports.

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