Patent ID: 8605677

Claim:
A method for routing a packet flow in a communication session, comprising: facilitating a communication session between a first endpoint and a second endpoint; communicating a plurality of path offers for a packet flow from a transient anchor of a visited network to a permanent anchor of a home network in one or more offer messages, the path offers sent by the first endpoint, the path offers comprising an optimized path offer representing an optimized path for the packet flow and a default path offer representing a default path for the packet flow, the optimized path passing through the transient anchor and bypassing the permanent anchor, the path offers for the packet flow communicated to allow the home network to remove a path offer from the one or more offer messages to select routing; receiving at the transient anchor the packet flow from the first endpoint; receiving, by the transient anchor, one or more policy rules from a policy server of the visited network if the one or more packet flows are to be routed along the optimized path, the one or more policy rules comprising one or more usage tracking rules specifying how to track usage of the visited network by the first endpoint; determining, by the transient anchor, whether the packet flow is to be routed along the optimized path according to one or more routing rules of the one or more policy rules of routing selected according to the removed path offer from the one or more offer messages; sending the packet flow from the transient anchor to the second endpoint along the optimized path if the default path offer has been removed from the one or more offer messages; and forwarding the packet flow from the transient anchor to the permanent anchor of a home network along the default path if the optimized path offer has been removed from the one or more offer messages, the permanent anchor configured to forward the packet flow to the second endpoint.