Inventors:
Neeraj Malhotra - Raleigh NC, US
Tuan Liao - Chapel Hill NC, US
Assignee:
Nortel Networks Limited - St. Laurent, Quebec
International Classification:
H04L 12/26
Abstract:
The present invention provides an interworking peripheral module, which acts as a liaison between a circuit-switched telephone switch and a packet network. The interworking peripheral module includes a TDM module, such as a common equipment module, which cooperates with the telephony switch and two TDM-packet modules, which convert outgoing TDM traffic to packets and incoming packets to TDM traffic. The TDM-packet modules act in a redundant fashion, wherein one of the TDM-packet modules is active while the other TDM-packet module is inactive. The active TDM-packet module will convert the outgoing TDM traffic to packets and route the outgoing packets to a packet network via one or more routers. The inactive TDM-packet module will also convert the TDM traffic to packets in an identical fashion to the active TDM-packet module, but will drop the outgoing packets before they are routed to the packet network.
