To achieve greater scalability,this Recommendation decomposes the ITU-T H.323 Gateway function defined in Recommendation ITU-T H.246 into functional subcomponents and specifies the protocols these components use to communicate.This allows implementations of ITU-T H.323 gateways to be highly scalable and encourages leverage of widely deployed Switched Circuit Network (SCN) capabilities such as SS7 switches.This also enables ITU-T H.323 gateways to be composed of components from multiple vendors distributed across multiple physical platforms.The purpose of this Recommendation is to add capabilities currently defined for ITU-T H.323 systems and is intended to provide new ways of performing operations already supported in ITU-T H.323.