| Summary: |
An application server is defined as an entity that is capable of
providing advanced features to users. Examples of features include
call forwarding, call screening, debit card calling, web interactive
voice response, etc. However, the set of functions needed to enable a
broad range of such applications is quite large - it includes speech
recognition, DTMF recognition and digit collection, text-to-speech
synthesis, database interfacing, audio and video coding and decoding,
audio and video bridging and mixing, and signaling, to name a few.
Supporting such a large set of functions on the same box presents a
major challenge. To solve this problem, the industry is proposing a
decomposition of the application server into two components - a media
server that handles the media component, and an application server
that handles the call control, data, and signaling. The interface
that has been proposed between these two elements is a control
mechanism along the lines of MGCP or Megaco. In this paper, we
propose an orthogonal decomposition, which breaks an application
server into application server components. Each component represents
a application server in its own right, but it provides a well defined
component that by itself may be a complete, but simpler, application.
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