Patent ID: 7889646

Claim:
An admission control method in a network that facilitates differentiated end-to-end data transport between at least one of a network service provider and an application service provider and a customer premises network that includes customer premises equipment, comprising: obtaining from a user of the network policy information associated with services accessed through the network, the policy information comprising relative priority information among the services; establishing communication between a node in the network and at least one of the network service provider and the application service provider and between the node in the network and the customer premises network using a resource reservation protocol to request resources for a flow having one of the services associated therewith between at least one of the network service provider and the application service provider and the customer premises network; and obtaining at the node in the network a determination of whether to grant or deny access to the network to the flow based on the policy information associated with the one of the services; wherein obtaining at the node in the network the determination of whether to grant or deny access to the network comprises: establishing a common open policy service protocol session to communicate the request for resources from the node in the network to a data processing system; determining at the data processing system whether to grant or deny access to the network to the flow based on the policy information associated with the one of the services; and establishing a common open policy service protocol session to communicate the determination of whether to grant or deny access to the network to the flow from the data processing system to the node in the network.