A method and apparatus for enabling the determination of the location of a terminal in a communications system

摘要

In a telecommunications network utilising in particular soft phones it is sometimes difficult to identify the location of the "phone" making a call. This is particularly significant when the call is one made to an emergency service for urgent assistance. A location manager is included in the network to assign port addresses to certain line identification numbers. Then in order to locate the calling terminal the port location is utilised. Assuming an emergency originates at terminal D, the spanning tree protocol is utilised and the network manager 6 identifies from bridge protocol data units the root node (switch 2) and port 8 connected to the terminal D.