Glossary: DTMF Relay
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Dual-tone Multi-frequency Relay (DTMF) is the mechanism where a VoIP gateway listens for in-call tones, and relay them to the peer according to the negotiated method.
Relaying DTMF prevents loosing its signal integrity over VoIP compressed codecs. The relayed DTMF is then being regenerated transparently on the peer side.
There are 3 common ways of relaying DTMF:
SIP INFO
In band
is the prefered method for relaying, where the in-call DTMF are removed from the in band voice, and are sent to the peer over the RTP stream, as specially marked packet.
This method also offers a robustness against packet losses by using redundancy scheme.
RFC2833 is usually being handled by VoIP hardware, and requires no CPU intervention.
The SIP INFO method can be used by SIP network elements to transmit DTMF tones out-of-band as telephone-events in a reliable manner independent of the media stream.
In the DTMF relay method the body of the SIP message consists of signaling information and uses the content-type application/dtmf-relay
This method can be used where peer VoIP doesn't support RFC2833. This method relies on CPU power to relay the DTMF.
In band is used when the two other methods aren't available. The DTMF is relay with in band voice, and is more likely to work on lossless codecs, like G.711.
By default, the Gateway tries to negotiate RFC2833 DTMF relay, by announcing its telephone-event capability in the SIP INVITE.
When telephone-event SDP negotiation fails, then SIP INFO is used. When RFC2833 is used, SIP INFO DTMF-Relay events are not relayed. Otherwise, in band DTMF is used.
It is possible to change the default mode of operation from one network to another by assigning a different profile to each network (NAP). For example, if one network has in band DTMF and the other has RFC2833, it will capture the in band DTMF and create RTP events on the other leg and vice-versa. On ProSBC this requires a transcoding unit.
This default behavior can be overridden using . DTMF-Relay methods can be added/removed and ordered as needed.