Multiplex communications – Pathfinding or routing – Combined circuit switching and packet switching
Reexamination Certificate
1998-06-12
2003-07-22
Kizou, Hassan (Department: 2662)
Multiplex communications
Pathfinding or routing
Combined circuit switching and packet switching
C370S465000, C370S355000, C370S356000, C379S220010
Reexamination Certificate
active
06597688
ABSTRACT:
BACKGROUND OF THE INVENTION
The present invention relates to the field of message receipt/transmission and delivery using computer, phone, wireless and other communications networks. Specifically, the present invention relates to the transmission of e-mail messages which may be text only, text plus an audio file, text plus a video file, text plus a fax file or any combination thereof to a phone, pager or fax machine or other receiving device suitable for the message content, over appropriate communications networks using an architecture which enables easy expansion to handle additional message traffic as well as to connect to additional communications networks, including networks which do not presently exist which may become available in the future.
DESCRIPTION OF RELATED ART
Voice and data communications systems such as the public switched telephone network (PSTN) are currently used to transfer image and text data transmitted by facsimile (“fax”) machines in addition to the normally carried voice traffic. These faxed images are usually transmitted through the PSTN and received for printout or storage of the image on a destination fax machine or computer for the use by the recipient.
In U.S. Pat. No. 6,208,638 entitled Method and Apparatus for Transmission and Retrieval of Facsimile and Audio Messages Over a Circuit or Packet Switched Network, it is disclosed that to provide for the receipt and transmission of audio and fax information by a first user over a circuit switched network such as the public switched telephone network (PSTN) to a second user over a packet switched network such as the Internet, a communications server is connected both to the circuit switched network and a packet switched network.
The communications server contains resources to receive and process incoming audio and facsimile calls from the circuit switched network into a format suitable for transmission over the packet switched network to the second user's address. In addition, a link is first determined between the second user's address on the circuit switched network and the second user's address on the packet switched network, and then an appropriate route to the second user's address on the packet network is determined. With the system being maintained in a distributed and redundant fashion, reliable receipt and transfer of all messages is ensured.
However, the architecture utilized as described in U.S. Pat. No. 6,208,638 is not easily scalable to handle increasingly higher levels of message traffic or to easily connect to networks in addition to the PSTN and the Internet.
FIG. 1
shows the essence of the architecture of U.S. Pat. No. 6,208,638. An e-mail message is passed to an outbound resource
11
(communications server
550
in U.S. Pat. No. 6,208,638) which converts the e-mail message to a fax format or to audio for transmission to a fax machine or telephone connected to the PSTN. A database
13
stores customer information necessary for processing of messages (an unnumbered part of communications server
150
in U.S. Pat. No. 6,208,638 which is also contained in database server
195
in U.S. Pat. No. 6,208,638). After processing of an e-mail message by outbound resource
11
, a fax or voice mail message is sent over the PSTN or more generally, a generalized switched telephone network (GSTN) which includes cellular telephone networks as well as the PSTN. Optionally, a pager message may also be sent informing a user of the fax which has been sent or availability of a voice mail message as described in U.S. Pat. No. 6,073,165 entitled Processing and Forwarding Messages From a Computer Network to a Forwarding Service.
SUMMARY OF THE INVENTION
A system for supporting a message delivery service is described that has a highly scalable architecture. Multiple processing servers are each coupled to communicate with multiple outbound resources and with a database server over an internal packet-switched data network. The database server contains account information on customers of the service. Request messages received from a customer over an external packet-switched data network (such as the Internet) are stored in a queue. The queue is polled for pending requests and a request message is obtained therefrom. A customer associated with this obtained request message is validated after accessing the account information in the database server. An outbound resource is assigned to this request message, where each of these resources is capable of converting an input request message into a format capable of being received by a fax machine over a telephone network.
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Kumar Amit
Narasimhan Anand
Shemesh Yaacov
Blakely & Sokoloff, Taylor & Zafman
Hoang Thai
j2 Global Communications, Inc.
Kizou Hassan
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