Patent ID: 8305890

Claim:
A method for enabling prioritization of signaling messages in a communication network, comprising: receiving a signaling message; classifying the signaling message; scheduling the signaling message for processing; and discarding selectively the signaling message that has been scheduled under an overload condition, wherein the discarding comprises discarding the signaling message that has been scheduled from a non-provisional message queue using a head drop trigger discard method if a provisional queue is empty and the non-provisional message queue is not empty when a high priority message or a non-provisional signaling message is newly received, wherein the head drop trigger discard method comprises: initializing a dropping zone to a tail dropping zone and a dropping counter to zero when the head drop trigger discard method has not previously been initialized; setting the dropping zone to a head dropping zone if the dropping counter has exceeded a predetermined head drop trigger threshold; and setting the dropping zone to a tail dropping zone if the dropping counter has returned to zero.