Options For Bridging Channels In A Smart Bridge

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Hello,

I am struggling with a problem which I thought would be an easy one :
bridging several channels together in a *smart* bridge. I emphasize
*smart* : I want my bridge to be a native_rtp one when only two channels are involved, and switch to softmix technology when a third channel comes in.

I thought I could use ConfBridge for that, but it creates a bridge that is not smart (it is of type softmix even if two channels only are involved).

I can do this with ARI of course, but handling transfers will become quite difficult : I will receive replace_channels events, and channel optimization will not be performed. I managed to have something working this way, but I had to write a lot of code and some situations are very tricky to debug.

The easiest way I found was to write a piece if dialplan mixing BridgeWait, Bridge and BridgeAdd. This works well, transfers are handled by the Asterisk core, and the bridge is smart. Still, it requires to maintain a list of bridged channels in order to call BridgeWait, Bridge and BridgeAdd in the right order and with the right parameters.

Can you think of any other way (hopefully easier) to achieve this ?

Regards

Jean

4 thoughts on - Options For Bridging Channels In A Smart Bridge

  • Not really, there’s no cookie cutter application that behaves as you need using the bridging API.

  • Le 2017-07-05 18:51, Joshua Colp a écrit :

    at 01:45 PM, Jean Aunis wrote:
    problem which I thought would be an easy one : bridging several channels together in a *smart* bridge. I emphasize *smart* : I want my bridge to be a native_rtp one when only two channels are involved, and switch to softmix technology when a third channel comes in. I thought I could use ConfBridge for that, but it creates a bridge that is not smart (it is of type softmix even if two channels only are involved). I can do this with ARI of course, but handling transfers will become quite difficult : I
    will receive replace_channels events, and channel optimization will not be performed. I managed to have something working this way, but I had to write a lot of code and some situations are very tricky to debug. The easiest way I found was to write a piece if dialplan mixing BridgeWait, Bridge and BridgeAdd. This works well, transfers are handled by the Asterisk core, and the bridge is smart. Still, it requires to maintain a list of bridged channels in order to call BridgeWait, Bridge and BridgeAdd in the right order and with the right parameters. Can you think of any other way (hopefully easier) to achieve this ?
    really, there’s no cookie cutter application that behaves as you using the bridging API.

    Thank you for your quick answer.

    Do you think it could make sense to add an option to the ConfBridge application for this ? Personally I would say “not really”, because many ConfBridge features may become unusable when the bridge is in native_rtp technology.

  • I don’t really know. This is really the first time anyone has ever brought it up that I’ve seen so it’s certainly not something people are wanting. As for the implementation ConfBridge was never designed or written with such a thing in mind, so the repercussions of doing so are an unknown. It may be as easy as turning the feature on and it “just works” including knowing when features and such are enabled, or maybe not.

  • Le 05/07/2017 à 22:41, Joshua Colp a écrit :
    maybe I will consider patching ConfBridge or writing my own application in the future.

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