Gatekeeper

[Horacio Gutierrez]

Hello,

What is the function of a gatekeeper in a IPCC call center environment?

Thanks.

[Gergely Szabo]

Hi,

gatekeepers are like DNS servers in a large H.323 environment, what they basically do is either confirming or rejecting phone calls (among others). They are not really contact center elements, however, you can incorporate one in your contact center, of course, but chances are you won't really need that. And if your VOIP signalling does not use H.323 at all, you don't have to worry about gatekeepers anyway.

G.

[Horacio Gutierrez]

I thought the voice gateway would reject and confirm the calls then what does the voice gateway do when there is a gatekeeper involved in a IPCC call center, can you please give me an example of how gatekeeper would work in a call center when there are two voice gateways involved, I also do not understand your comparison between dns servers and gatekeeper.

Thanks.

[Gergely Szabo]

Hi,

well, as I said, gatekeepers are elements of an H.323 VOIP network and since they are involved in VOIP signalling they cannot be considered as relatives of a call center system.

What they basically do is keeping a list of zones, or simply, a list of devices. When these devices want to set up a call, they ask the gatekeeper and the it responds with an Admission Confirm or an Admission Reject message, based on what it sees in its configuration (just for the sake of simplicity: phone number P maps to zone A device X). So basically it's like looking up an IP address based on the FQDN.

Just to give you an example, a call may come in on gateway G1, which is registered to gatekeeper GK, and its configuration points all calls to be processed by the gatekeeper. So G1 asks GK: "I have a number incoming to +3130123412345, what do I do?", and in the response message, it is being told to contact gateway G2, so it does. G2 then asks GK, "I've got a call coming from G1, is it okay", and when GK confirms this, the call proceeds to G2 from G1 (and for instance, if there's a call center behind G2, it may end up there).

G.

[Gajanan Pande]

An easier way to know what Gatekeeper does in Contact Center environment, is to search UCCE & CVP SRND Guides for the word " Gatekeeper ".

One of the significant use of Gatekeeper would be when UCCE has CVP ( H.323 Deployment ). Gatekeeper would be used to load balance between multiple CVP Call servers.

In UCCE, following is one of the usage documented in UCCE SRND guide.

Gatekeeper-based or RSVP Agent-based call admission control could be used to reroute calls between sites over the PSTN when WAN bandwidth is not available. It is best to ensure that adequate WAN bandwidth exists between sites for the maximum amount of calling that can occur.

UCCE SRND Guide : http://www.cisco.com/en/US/docs/voice_ip_comm/cust_contact/contact_center/ipcc_enterprise/ipccenterprise8_5_1/design/guide/uccesrnd85.pdf

CVP SRND Guide : http://www.cisco.com/en/US/docs/voice_ip_comm/cust_contact/contact_center/customer_voice_portal/srnd/8_5x/cvp85srnd.pdf

Hope it helps ?

Please rate useful posts.

GP.