To achieve greater scalability, this Recommendation decomposes the H.323 Gateway function defined in ITU-T Rec. H.246 into functional subcomponents and specifies the protocols these components use to communicate. This allows implementations of H.323 gateways to be highly scalable and encourages leverage of widely deployed Switched Circuit Network (SCN) capabilities such as SS7 switches. This also enables H.323 gateways to be composed of components from multiple vendors distributed across multiple physical platforms. The purpose of this Recommendation is to add capabilities currently defined for H.323 systems and is intended to provide new ways of performing operations already supported in H.323.