In the last years the convergence between circuit switched and packet switched communication networks has become more and more important, not at least because of the growing Voice over IP or rather Multimedia over IP tendency. Currently, network providers from the classical circuit switched world have to think about enabling interconnection to the IP domain over appropriated gateways. Another important issue is the centralization of service logic to make it usable from different types of networks. If this is done over open interfaces, so called 3rd Party Service Providers could offer their services in a more flexible way. Hybrid Components, called softswitches, could fulfil both, gateway functionality and access to centralized applications using standardized interfaces. One possibility for such an interface could be the Parlay API. In this paper we propose three different Softswitch architectures supporting connectivity to the PSTN as well as to the IP world. They differ in the placement of network specific components and in the way of gateway control. In each case Parlay is used between the networks specific Call Control and the independent application.
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