The on-ramp gateway receives fax calls at an E.164 number. The gateway attempts to route fax calls using fax relay. If the attempt fails, the call is forwarded to an SMTP server by a mail transfer agent (MTA) using T.37-standard protocols for store-and-forward fax.
Fax rollover is configured by installing the TCL IVR rollover application to the on-ramp gateway and adding the application to the POTS dial peer that answers T.38 calls.
The TCL IVR application has a procedure for setting up the call, waiting for success, and, upon receiving a busy or gateway-down message, setting up the same call again with new destination parameters. When the call is returned to the originating gateway, the gateway searches for a new VoIP dial peer with the same destination number, and a preference equal to or greater than the first dial peer that it found. If it finds one, it sets up the call again.
Dial peers for the fax rollover application include at least one inbound dial peer to receive calls from the PSTN and at least two outbound dial peers, one for fax relay and one for store-and-forward fax.
The inbound dial peer describes the inbound call leg from the telephony connection to the gateway and is called a plain old telephone service (POTS) dial peer. POTS dial peers define the characteristics of the telephony (PSTN) connection between the sending fax device or voice instrument and the gateway to the IP network. In general, the gateway uses the line characteristics defined by POTS dial peers to determine call type and call destination.
The gateway then finds an outbound dial peer whose configured parameters match these attributes and routes the call to it. You can establish more than one POTS dial peer if you want different incoming calls to receive different handling. The fax rollover application is enabled on the inbound dial peer.
One of the two types of outbound dial peers in the gateway router is the Voice-over-IP (VoIP) dial peer, which describes the fax relay call leg that is outbound from the router.
The second type of outbound dial peer on the on-ramp gateway is the Multimedia-Mail-over-IP (MMoIP) dial peer, which describes an IP call leg for store-and-forward fax. The MMoIP dial peer is configured with the fax_on_vfc_onramp_app IVR application in the outbound mode, which is the standard configuration for store-and-forward fax.