Hubbell Incorporated
System for routing multicast page/party call audio among voice over internet (VoIP) devices in different local area networks (LANs) via internet

Abstract:

A gateway is configured to be situated in a local area network (LAN) of Internet Protocol (IP)-based units having a serverless page party (SP2) function that employs multicast technology for page/party audio. The gateway converts multicast call traffic to unicast call traffic for transmission over the Internet to one or more IP units with SP2 function in different LANs. These different LANs are each provided with respective gateways that are configured to convert the unicast traffic back to multicast traffic to connect the page/party audio of an SP2 system among disparate facilities having different LANs, obviating the need for a dedicated and expensive wide area network for inter-LAN communication among IP units with SP2 function. A license and configuration server is configured to maintain a database of IP addresses of each gateway assigned to the respective inter-LAN or Internet groups and to communicate group IP addresses to the gateways.