System and method for interfacing signaling information and voice traffic

摘要

A telecommunications network (10) includes a gateway (18) that receives signaling information in a message based signaling format from a Class 5 softswitch (26). The gateway (18) also receives voice traffic over an inter-machine trunk from a public switched telephone network (12). The gateway (18) places the voice traffic into data packets. The gateway (18) transfers the data packets and the signaling information to an Internet Protocol network (30). The data packets and the signaling information may be transferred over a common physical link and over separate logical links.