Patent ID: 8842681

Claim:
A method for policy control in a data packet network comprising a user equipment, an intermediate gateway, a home gateway and a home policy control node, the method comprising the steps of: establishing an encrypted data packet tunnel between the user equipment and the home gateway; establishing an IP flow session by the user equipment; generating a data packet marking identifier for the IP flow session by the user equipment; generating another data packet marking identifier by the home policy control node, said data packet marking identifier generated by the user equipment and said other data packet marking identifier generated by the home policy control node being the same; determining policy and charging decisions for the IP flow session by the intermediate gateway; sending by the user equipment data packets of the IP flow session in the encrypted data packet tunnel to the home gateway; marking by the user equipment an outer header of the encrypted and tunneled data packets of the IP flow session with the data packet marking identifier; and applying by the intermediate gateway the policy and charging decisions to the marked data packets, wherein: in the steps of generating the data packet marking identifier by the user equipment and generating the other data packet marking identifier by the home policy control node source and destination addresses and source and destination port numbers of the IP flow session are used as input parameters.