Patent ID: 6862453

Claim:
A controller for monitoring usage status of trunk lines associated with a switch, said switch capable of handling call connections between calling devices and called devices on a plurality of trunk lines associated with said switch, said controller comprising N call application nodes capable of executing a plurality of trunk idle list server applications that allocate ones of said trunk lines to said call connections, wherein a first trunk idle list server application is executed on a first one of said N call application nodes and is associated with a second trunk idle list server application executed on a second one of said N call application nodes separate from said first call application node, said first and second trunk idle list server applications thereby forming a load sharing group server application, wherein said load sharing group server application receives a trunk line allocation request from a call process being executed in said switch and selects one of said first and second trunk idle list server applications to allocate a trunk line to a call connection associated with said trunk line allocation request according to a load distribution algorithm.