Patent ID: 8879431

Claim:
A method of load balancing of requests between Diameter-enabled network devices, the method comprising: processing, at a signal controller in communication with a first Diameter-enabled network device and a second Diameter-enabled network device, request handling capacity of at least the second Diameter-enabled network device; allocating, at the signal controller, one or more tokens for inbound requests from the first Diameter-enabled network device to the second Diameter-enabled network device; notifying the second Diameter-enabled network device of the one or more allocated tokens for handling a corresponding number of requests from the first Diameter-enabled network device; coordinating, at the signal controller, transmission of the corresponding number of requests from the first Diameter-enabled network device to the second Diameter-enabled network device via the signal controller; detecting, at the second Diameter-enabled network device, an overload condition in the second Diameter-enabled network device; and notifying the signal controller to allocate zero tokens to the second Diameter-enabled network device, wherein the signal controller does not send any further requests to the second Diameter-enabled network device.