Patent ID: 8374083

Claim:
A method for priority-based network congestion control, the method being implemented by a network entity, the method comprising: determining one or more priorities associated with a service request that is being processed by the network entity; determining resource availability; determining whether to grant the service request based on the one or more priorities associated with the service request and the resource availability; determining whether to request a handover of lower priority services based on the one or more priorities associated with the service request and the resource availability; and sending a message to a subscriber station to implement subscriber station-based admission control, wherein implementing subscriber station-based admission control comprises determining whether to send a subsequent service request based on a priority associated with the subsequent service request and not sending low priority service requests when there is insufficient resource availability, wherein sending the message comprises sending a broadcast message to devices assigned to a non-emergency category to start the subscriber station based admission control in response to detecting network congestion.