Media Gateway Control Protocol

The media gateway control protocol architecture and its methodologies and programming interfaces are described in RFC 2805.

This facilitates centralized gateway administration and provides scalable IP telephony solutions.

The MGCP model assumes that call agents synchronize with each other to send coherent commands and responses to the gateways under their control.

The call agent uses MGCP to request event notifications, reports, status, and configuration data from the media gateway, as well as to specify connection parameters and activation of signals toward the PSTN telephony interface.

Typically, a media gateway may be configured with a list of call agents from which it may accept control commands.

In case of multiple call agents, MGCP assumes that they maintain knowledge of device state among themselves.

Commands and responses are encoded in messages that are structured and formatted with the whitespace characters space, horizontal tab, carriage return, linefeed, colon, and full stop.

One verb is used by an endpoint to indicate to the call agent that it has detected an event for which the call agent had previously requested notification with the RQNT command: One verb is used by a call agent to modify coding characteristics expected by the line side of the endpoint: One verb is used by an endpoint to indicate to the call agent that it is in the process of restarting: Another implementation of the media gateway control protocol architecture is the H.248/Megaco protocol, a collaboration of the Internet Engineering Task Force (RFC 3525) and the International Telecommunication Union (Recommendation H.248.1).