ViDeNet Root Level Architecture

ViDeNet will adopt the hierarchical gatekeeper scheme developed by the European research and education community and described in detail at http://www.wvn.ac.uk/support/h323address.htm. This architecture will support existing and new ViDeNet users, the Internet2 Commons and international video and voice over IP deployments. The initial implementation of this hierarchy will be built around the RADVISION ECS Pro version 2 gatekeeper. A global root gatekeeper will have as children, gatekeepers associated with each country. The Numerical Address Space Management Team will manage the Global Tier, country tiers when appropriate agreements are reached with individual countries, and certain leaves as appropriate, such as the ViDeNet Public Zone and other public, shared or test resources. A RADVISION ENC tool will be used to administer the gatekeeper hierarchy. All information on the hierarchy will be stored in a database that will be accessible via secure client by members of the NASM team.

In the first iteration, a single global root will be implemented. This global root will have a live hot standby gatekeeper configured to automatically fail-over in the event of the unavailability of the primary gatekeeper. A US gatekeeper will be similarly configured to serve Internet2 and other US sites. The ViDeNet Public Zone will be configured as a leaf serving MCU resources globally and acting as test facility.

Simultaneous to the creation of this simple, redundant hierarchy, a set of alternate gatekeepers will be implemented at both the global and country tiers. An alternate gatekeeper, with a live hot standby gatekeeper, will be implemented in Europe and Australia. These gatekeepers will be neighbored in a mesh with the global root gatekeeper in the US. This will enable country tier gatekeepers to have redundant parents in the event of a network layer problem associated with their primary parent. A similar architecture will be created on the country level in the US in support of the Internet2 Commons. It is expected that other countries will adopt a similar architecture. This mesh neighboring will also include Cisco MCM and other non-RADVISION gatekeepers as contributed by NASM team members as they can be effectively integrated into the mesh.

ViDeNet Gatekeeper Hierarchy Management (.jpg, 342 kb)