Load Director™ (LoDi™) is a product which distributes telephony calls (load) across multiple PBX’s, routes, or endpoints. In it’s simplest form LoDi can be a load balancer, sending calls to PBX’s or other devices downstream based on their available capacity and capabilities. LoDi can also be a Least Cost Router (LCR), directing calls to different routes based on their cost, time of day, and more. The result is optimal use of each downstream device’s capacity and capabilities, or upstream route costs.

LoDi’s call distribution algorithms range from simple round-robin and waterfall, to sophisticated algorithms, or even user-defined algorithms. LoDi can dynamically determine the capacity of connected devices and direct calls based on each device’s available capacity. LoDi includes agents for monitoring downstream PBX’s (such as Asterisk® and FreeSWITCH®) and upstream trunks, REST based interfaces for querying intelligent PBX’s or services, and user defined rules for calculating device/route capacity in real-time (for legacy devices/PBX’s/trunks).

LoDi is also a technology gateway, bridging various trunk technologies, protocols, codecs, and more. LoDi can accept calls from TDM trunks, SIP trunks, IAX trunks, H.323 trunks, and more, delivering them to any other trunking technology. Similarly, LoDi can offload processing from downstream devices by performing codec conversion, SSL decoding, etc. The administrator can also decide if LoDi should stay in the call stream or not.

LoDi has intelligent analysis and tagging capabilities based on dialed number, originating trunk, originating caller ID, time of day, header fields, etc. LoDi can even rewrite headers, add new headers, and remove headers. As a result, downstream devices can capture important information from the originating call, and calls can be redirected based on any available parameter.

In addition to its load directing capabilities, LoDi ensures calls remain up in the event of equipment failure or other disasters.  In the event that an endpoint fails (or is deemed unhealthy), LoDi can transfer all of that endpoint’s calls in progress to one of pool of standby devices.  The standby device will resume the full state of the failed node, and continue to process new and existing calls.  Even the LoDi server itself can be clustered, creating a highly available load balancing environment suitable for carriers and other mission critical deployments.

LoDi is available as a turnkey hardware device, a virtual device (for AWS / VMware), or as a software package which can be added to an existing Linux server. LoDi’s capacity is limited only by the platform on which it runs.