Implementing a dial plan

Before you deploy the Pexip Infinity platform in your network, you must consider your dial plan and ensure that calls to Virtual Meeting Room, Virtual Auditorium and Virtual Reception aliases, and calls that are to be interworked using the Pexip Distributed Gateway, will be routed to the appropriate Conferencing Nodes.

If your environment includes a PSTN gateway or uses an ITSP (Internet telephony service provider), consider the potential for toll fraud if you have Gateway Routing Rules that can route calls to the PSTN gateway or ITSP, or if you allow conference participants to dial out to other participants via the PSTN gateway or ITSP. See PSTN gateways and toll fraud for more information.

Service precedence

Calls received by Pexip Infinity are routed as follows:

1. Pexip Infinity receives an incoming call via one of its Conferencing Nodes.
2. It checks whether the destination alias belongs to any Pexip Infinity Virtual Meeting Rooms, Virtual Auditoriums or Virtual Receptions; if so, it directs the call to that service.
3. If the alias does not belong to any of the above services, Pexip Infinity checks the Gateway Routing Rules to see if the alias matches any rules specified there. If so, it places an outgoing call to the destination alias using the protocol specified in the matching rule (or if the call is to a registered device, over the same protocol that the device used to make the registration).

This means that if an alias matches both a Virtual Meeting Room and a Gateway Routing Rule, the former will always take precedence and the call will be routed to the Virtual Meeting Room. You must therefore ensure that any regular expressions used in a Gateway Routing Rule do not unintentionally overlap with any aliases used by Virtual Meeting Rooms, Virtual Auditoriums or Virtual Receptions.

See Regular expression (regex) reference for information about writing regular expressions.

Pexip Infinity's call routing logic is shown in the following diagram:

Using a standard format for aliases

We recommend that you use a standard format for all Virtual Meeting Room and Virtual Auditorium aliases within your Pexip Infinity deployment. A simple way to do this would be to have a set prefix such as meet., followed by a user name, followed by your domain. For example:

• meet.alice.smith@example.com (for Alice's VMR)
• meet.bob.jones@example.com (for Bob's VMR)
• meet.sales@example.com (for the sales team's Virtual Auditorium)
• meet.reception@example.com (for the Virtual Reception)

Using this standard format will then make it simple to configure your call management system to route calls matching the format to the appropriate Conferencing Nodes.

Routing calls to the local Conferencing Node

When your call management system receives a call to a Virtual Meeting Room, Virtual Auditorium or Virtual Reception alias, it must then decide where to route the call.

A single conference can take place across one, two or more Conferencing Nodes with no difference in conference experience from the users' perspective. We recommend that in the first instance, calls are routed to the Conferencing Node that is geographically nearest to the endpoint that placed the call. This reduces the WAN bandwidth used for the conference in two ways: firstly, endpoints are only making local calls; and secondly, if more than one Conferencing Node is involved, only one set of media has to be sent between the two locations.

We recommend that you set up rules on your call management system so that calls originating from a particular location (defined by zone, subzone or IP address range) and placed to a Pexip Infinity alias are routed to a specific Conferencing Node. To build on the previous example, we have configured subzones on our call management system which group together endpoints in a particular physical location, and we have then set up the following call routing rules:

Source	Alias	Destination zone
Oslo subzone	meet.*@example.com.*	Norway Conferencing Node
New York subzone	meet.*@example.com.*	Americas Conferencing Node
Boston subzone	meet.*@example.com.*	Americas Conferencing Node

In this case, users in Oslo, New York and Boston could all call meet.sales@example.com and be routed to the same conference.

Further information

For further information about how to configure your specific call management system to work with Pexip Infinity, see the following documentation:

• Pexip Infinity and Microsoft Lync / Skype for Business
• Pexip Infinity and Cisco VCS
• Pexip Infinity and Cisco Unified Communications Manager
• Pexip Infinity and Polycom DMA