A system and method for a gatekeeper (108) to multicast commands to all
gateways (106) in the system. The gateways (106) listen for one of their
peer gateways (106) to accept. If one accepts, then the other gateways
ignore the pending call request. The gatekeeper (108) making the request
can specify an order in which the gateways (106) are to respond to its
request. The order may be based on a variety of factors, such as number of
calls presently being handled by a particular gateway (106) or cost of
calls. Further, the gateways (106) may be provided with timers to process
a call request in the requested order if a gateway (106) earlier in the
queue fails to respond.
