Patent ID: 8116720

Claim:
A method for routing an emergency call wherein the call sequentially traverses two or more nodes in a transmission path of the call, the method comprising: providing a data base in which respective, unique node identifiers for the two or more nodes in the transmission path may be mapped to a public safety answering point (PSAP) established to serve calls arriving at the mapped node, wherein ones of the two or more nodes operate to embed in the call the respective, unique identifiers for the traversed nodes; receiving an emergency call; sequentially evaluating the node identifiers, beginning with the identifier for the node most proximate to an originator of the emergency call until a node identifier is found having a mapping in the data base to a PSAP; selecting the node having a mapping to a PSAP as an end node for the call; and routing the emergency call to the public safety answering point associated with the selected end node.