Patent ID: 7808904

Claim:
A method comprising: defining each of a plurality of service contexts available to subscribers of a service provider in terms of one or more profile identifiers of a plurality of profile identifiers each of which is representative of a particular subscriber service supported by the service provider; providing a scalable subscriber profile database in which a memory requirement for the scalable subscriber profile database is dependent upon a number of available service contexts by hierarchically organizing the plurality of profile identifiers as intermediate profile identifiers and leaf profile identifiers, wherein the leaf profile identifiers explicitly define subscriber services and the intermediate profile identifiers indirectly represent sets of one or more subscriber services, which are defined by way of the intermediate profile identifiers' associations with one or more lower-level identifiers including zero or more of the leaf profile identifiers and zero or more of the intermediate profile identifiers; wherein the scalable subscriber profile database is distributed between an authentication system of the service provider and a plurality of virtual routers (VRs), wherein a first portion of the scalable subscriber profile database is stored within the authentication system, the first portion of the scalable subscriber profile database including information indicative of associations among the subscribers and corresponding first-level profile identifiers representing a subset of the intermediate profile identifiers and a second portion of the scalable subscriber profile database is stored within a profile manager operable within each of the plurality of VRs, the second portion including information indicative of the associations among the subset of intermediate profile identifiers and the one or more lower-level identifiers; receiving, by a subscriber manager of a virtual router (VR) of the plurality of VRs of a VR-based telecommunications system of the service provider, a subscriber connection request from a subscriber of the service provider; responsive to the subscriber connection request, determining, by the subscriber manager, the subscriber's service context based on the first-level profile identifier associated with the subscriber and the scalable subscriber profile database, wherein determining the service context includes requesting, from the first portion of the scalable profile database, the first-level profile identifier and requesting, from the second portion of the scalable profile database, the one or more lower-level profile identifiers associated with the first level profile identifier; and establishing, by the subscriber manager, the subscriber connection by configuring a virtual interface associated with the VR based on the subscriber's service context.