Cisco Voice Gateways

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Gateways provide a number of methods for connecting an IP telephony network to the Public Switched Telephone Network (PSTN), a legacy PBX, or key systems. Gateways range from specialized, entry-level and stand-alone voice gateways to high-end, feature-rich integrated router and Cisco Catalyst gateways. Cisco access gateways enable Cisco Unified Communications Manager (Unified CM) to communicate with non-IP telecommunications devices. There are two types of Cisco access gateways, analog and digital.

Cisco Access Analog Gateways

There are two categories of Cisco access analog gateways, trunk gateways and station gateways.

• Access analog station gateways - Analog station gateways connect Unified CM to Plain Old Telephone Service (POTS) analog telephones, interactive voice response (IVR) systems, fax machines, and voice mail systems. Station gateways provide Foreign Exchange Station (FXS) ports.
• Access analog trunk gateways - Analog trunk gateways connect Unified CM to PSTN central office (CO) or PBX trunks. Trunk gateways provide Foreign Exchange Office (FXO) ports for access to the PSTN, PBXs, or key systems, and E&M (recEive and transMit, or ear and mouth) ports for analog trunk connection to a legacy PBX. Whenever possible, use digital gateways to minimize any answer and disconnect supervision issues. Analog Direct Inward Dialing (DID) and Centralized Automatic Message Accounting (CAMA) are also available for PSTN connectivity.

Cisco Access Digital Trunk Gateways

A Cisco access digital trunk gateway connects Unified CM to the PSTN or to a PBX via digital trunks such as Primary Rate Interface (PRI), Basic Rate Interface (BRI), or T1 Channel Associated Signaling (CAS). Digital T1 PRI trunks may also be used to connect to certain legacy voice mail systems.

Gateways used in IP telephony applications must meet the following core feature requirements:

• Dual tone multifrequency (DTMF) relay capabilities

DTMF relay capability, specifically out-of-band DTMF, separates DTMF digits from the voice stream and sends them as signaling indications through the gateway protocol (H.323, SCCP, MGCP, or SIP) signaling channel instead of as part of the voice stream or bearer traffic. Out-of-band DTMF is required when using a low bit-rate codec for voice compression because the potential exists for DTMF signal loss or distortion.

• Supplementary services support

Supplementary services are typically basic telephony functions such as hold, transfer, and conferencing.

• Fax/modem support

Fax over IP enables interoperability of traditional analog fax machines with IP telephony networks. The fax image is converted from an analog signal and is carried as digital data over the packet network.

• Unified CM redundancy support

Cisco Unified Communications is based on a distributed model for high availability. Unified CM clusters provide for Unified CM redundancy. The gateways must support the ability to "re-home" to a secondary Unified CM in the event that a primary Unified CM fails. Redundancy differs from call survivability in the event of a Unified CM or network failure.

Gateway Protocols

Cisco Unified Communications Manager (3.0 and later) supports the following gateway protocols:

• H.323
• Media Gateway Control Protocol (MGCP)

Cisco Unified CM Release 4.0 and later supports Session Initiation Protocol (SIP) on the trunk side. The SIP trunk implementation has been enhanced in Cisco Unified CM releases 5.0 through 7.x to support more features. Protocol selection depends on site-specific requirements and the installed base of equipment. For example, most remote branch locations have Cisco 2600XM, 2800, 3700, or 3800 Series routers installed. These routers support SIP, H.323, and MGCP 0.1 with Cisco IOS Release 12.2.11(T) and Cisco Unified CM Release 3.1 or later. For gateway configuration, MGCP might be preferred over H.323 or SIP due to simpler configuration. On the other hand, H.323 or SIP might be preferred over MGCP because of the robustness of the interfaces supported.

Simplified Message Desk Interface (SMDI) is a standard for integrating voice mail systems to PBXs or Centrex systems. Connecting to a voice mail system via SMDI and using either analog FXS or digital T1 PRI would require either SCCP or MGCP protocol because H.323 or SIP devices do not identify the specific line being used from a group of ports. Use of H.323 or SIP gateways for this purpose means the Cisco Message Interface cannot correctly correlate the SMDI information with the actual port or channel being used for an incoming call.

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