RELOAD, a distributed database for VIPR  Bridging VoIP Islands
RELOAD, a distributed database for VIPR  By TMCnet Special Guest
Marc Petit-Huguenin   |  April 25, 2012   While ENUM uses the
DNS, a hierarchical distributed database, to store its data,
VIPR uses a peer-to-peer distributed database. ENUM is designed
around the idea that only the owner of a phone number should be
empowered to publish the VoIP route that can be used to reach
this number. This design assumes that the owner of this phone
number has a motivation to do so, an assumption that falls apart
with the realization that the owner of a phone number is rarely
the user to whom this phone number is assigned and that the
goals of a phone user have very little in common with those of
its phone provider, to say the least. And that is without even
starting to deal with number portability, which makes the
problem of ownership of a phone number even fuzzier.  On the
other hand, VIPR is designed around the idea that who owns the
phone number does not m