About Local Policy

This section explains the role of local policy. Local policy lets you indicate where session requests, such as SIP INVITES, should be routed and/or forwarded. You use a local policy to set a preference for selecting one route over another. The local policy contains the following information that affects the routing of the SIP and H.323 signaling messages:

• information in the From header

  Information in the message’s From header is matched against the entries in the local policy’s from address parameter to determine if the local policy applies.

• list of configured realms

  This list identifies from what realm traffic is coming and is used for routing by ingress realm. The source realms identified in the list must correspond to the valid realm IDs you have already configured

• local policy attributes

  The attributes serve as an expression of preference, a means of selecting one route over another. They contain information such as the next signaling address to use (next hop) or whether you want to select the next hop by codec, the realm of the next hop, and the application protocol to use when sending a message to the next hop. You can also use the attributes to filter specific types of traffic.