Internet telephony is recently attracting an increasing amount of attention for the reason that it has the potential to significantly reduce the cost of long distance voice communication. To provide the interoperability between different manufacturers and vendors, ITU-T is actively drawing up the standard for the Internet telephony as ITU-T Rec. H.323. While the H.323 is continuously revised, there are, however, still many important issues needed to be further discussed. In particular, the bandwidth management, address translation, and intelligent call signaling/routing which are the major functions of an H.323 gatekeeper have not yet been fully addressed. In view of this, we develop in this paper an H.323 gatekeeper prototype which fully complies with the H.323 recommendation, and explicitly illustrate the usefulness of this prototype by devising two new methods to deal with the load balancing problem among the gatekeepers. Using the gatekeeper devised, one method for load balancing is based on Multiple-Registration with Multicasted LRQ and the other is based on Multiple-Registration with Hierarchical Database. It is noted that the gatekeeper prototype we devised is very versatile and can be easily extended to incorporate various features for further experiments.