Excel Switching Corporation

John R DeCesare

Timothy Ray Locascio

James F Allen

James Thomas DellaMorte, Sr

Gary Baldino

Peter H Corsini

Jesse Alvin Faunce

Kathleen M Lacey

Rajnish Jain

Octavio P Amaral

Patricia Langley

A system and method are disclosed for providing redundancy for telecommunication switches. A primary telecom switch has an active processing board and a passive I/O board for communicating with external sources, such as a control network and bearer traffic network. A redundant secondary telecom switch has an active processing board and a passive I/O board for communicating with a control network, and is connected to the I/O board of the primary switch through a redundancy connection for communicating with the bearer traffic network. According to the invention, the secondary telecom switch assumes the role of the primary telecom switch in the event that the primary processing board becomes unavailable. The secondary telecom switch then communicates with the bearer traffic network as the master switch through the redundancy connection and the I/O board of the primary switch, thus avoiding the necessity for reconnections and reconfiguration.

Redundancy arrangement for telecommunications switch

A system and method are disclosed for the licensing and managing media resources in a converged services platform. A novel central pool of resource points representing a licensed level of media resource capability is created, the central pool for the storage of all default and any additional licensed resource points represented by the converged services platform, where portions of the central pool are dynamically allocated to one or more media resource cards.

Media resource card with dynamically allocated resource points

A media resources card for use with a converged services platform. The media resources card, which includes one or more arrays of digital signal processors (DSPs), s operable to perform a variety of communication services including recording and playback of voice recorded announcements. A caching arrangement is provided in which a given recording (file) may have either a persistence level or timer expiration attribute or both.

Media resource card with programmable caching for converged services platform

The switch has a passive section and an active section or tray that may be docked to the passive section. The passive section contains only the physical interfaces to the switch's external data and telephony networks and power input. It is not intended to be a field replaceable unit and is therefore intended to be mounted in a rack system with all of the power and communications cables attached thereto. The telephony and data ports are routed from the passive section to the active section via connectors on the two sections as well as to a redundancy connector on the passive section that may be physically connected by a cable to a slave unit in a redundant application. The active section or tray contains all of the active components of the switch and is inserted via guides into the passive section. The tray is considered a field replaceable unit and can be inserted into and extracted from the passive section while the system is powered up and operational. As a result of its unique two-section design, the present switch has several advantages. For example upon failure, all active components of the system may be replaced without removing the mounting hardware from the rack in which the switch is mounted and without removing any cables connected to the switch. Also when the switch is part of a redundant system, when the switch fails, all of the active components of the switch may be replaced without interrupting system operations.

Telecommunications switch/server

Growing community of inventors

Sandwich, MA, United States of America

John R DeCesare