Patent ID: 7961615

Claim:
A method of creating a subscriber connection 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; receiving from a subscriber of a plurality of subscribers of a service provider a connection request at a subscriber manager of a virtual router (VR) of a plurality of VRs operable within a VR-based telecommunications system of the service provider; and if the subscriber is successfully authenticated, then creating, by the subscriber manager, a subscriber connection corresponding to the connection request by creating and configuring a virtual interface within the VR for the subscriber connection based on a first-level profile identifier associated with the subscriber and the scalable subscriber profile database.