American Telephone & Telegraph Co., At&t Bell Laboratories

John L Shepherd

John J Driscoll

Gregory S DeWitt

Methods and arrangements for properly associating an alerting message from an ISDN user terminal with the control process associated with the message are disclosed. Each call, in a disclosed switching network, is associated with a call control process and data structure. When an external request for a call is received, a data structure including a predetermined broadcast Terminal Endpoint Identifier (TEI) and a call reference value selected by the network, is created. Further, a message including the broadcast TEI and the selected call reference value is sent to a user terminal. The user terminal responds with an alerting message including the selected call reference value and a TEI unique to that terminal (not the broadcast TEI). The switching network searches the data structures until a data structure is located which includes the call reference value of the received message and the broadcast TEI. The TEI of the located data structure is then changed to the TEI of the received message so that further messages can uniquely identify the user terminal engaged in the call.

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Warrenville, IL, United States of America

John L Shepherd