Patent ID: 7072356

Claim:
A configurable telecommunications system, comprising: an interface device having a plurality of telephony resources and operable to maintain a local protocol database comprising a plurality of protocol modules, to identify, for each of the telephony resources, a protocol module required to process signals received by the telephony resource, to determine, for each of the identified protocol modules, whether the identified protocol module is valid in the local protocol database, to request each of the protocol modules not determined valid from a system controller, to receive the requested protocol modules from the system controller, to store the requested protocol modules in the local protocol database, and to handle parallel signaling for each of the telephony resources using the protocol module required for that one of the telephony resources; and the system controller operable to maintain a system protocol database storing a plurality of master protocol modules, to receive requests from the interface device requesting selected ones of the master protocol modules, and to communicate the requested master protocol modules from the system protocol database to the interface device.