Patent ID: 8856860

Claim:
An apparatus comprising: a memory operable to store a policy for a subscriber, the policy defining an authorized limit for the subscriber, the policy defining an establishment priority, a retention priority, and a priority offset for each application of a plurality of applications identified by a set of application identifiers; and one or more processors operable to: determine that a requested bearer of a requesting application and one or more existing bearers of one or more existing applications exceed the authorized limit; determine whether the establishment priority plus the priority offset for the requesting application is less than each of the one or more retention priorities of the one or more existing applications; if the establishment priority plus the priority offset is less than each of the one or more retention priorities, reject the request for the requested bearer for the requesting application; and if the establishment priority plus the priority offset is greater than at least one retention priority, pre-empt the at least one existing application associated with the at least one retention priority to allow for the requested bearer for the requesting application.