Worldcom, Inc.

Mci Worldcom, Inc.

Jeffrey W Campbell

Allen Holmes

Judy A Moldenhauer

Phyllis Santa

Phillip D Crable

Daniel Thomas Hutton

Henry N Fly

A next generation service node (NGSN) for providing advanced interactive voice response (IVR) services within a telecommunications network. The NGSN includes intelligent peripherals implemented as network audio servers, and application servers which execute customer application files to perform IVR services. The NGSN provides reliability through redundancy of application servers, including automatic application server failover within a node, and automatic node failover between NGSNs. The NGSN features include modular software and hardware architecture with internal function encapsulation. This allows multiple vendors products to be used and provides a common signaling interface to be used to any switch network. Other NGSN features include an open systems architecture with improved scaleability and increased application processing capability.

Advanced interactive voice response service node

Enhanced voice services (EVS) interactively communicate with a caller so as to provide audio prompting and selection of the final termination of a call. The present improvement includes load balancing, wherein degraded service of audio response units (ARUs) is detected. With load balancing, individual EVS ARU nodes are lumped into groups, where a group is a set of two or more functionally identical EVS audio response units (ARUs) that all support the same EVS customer applications. An inbound call for a given EVS application can be routed, based on a lookup at the data access point (DAP), to any ARU in the group. With the operating level of each ARU in a particular group being known, the percent allocations for each ARU are determined and an update is made at the DAP to route incoming calls to each ARU in the group according to the specified percentages. The load balancing process operates with a set of predefined rules for determining ARU statuses and call allocations, and also has the ability to actually throttle back calls if multiple nodes in an ARU group are degraded.

Enhanced voice services load balancing

Growing community of inventors

Monument, CO, United States of America

Jeffrey W Campbell