Patent ID: 8483191

Claim:
A system comprising: a first control-traffic-prioritizing module for managing control signals in accordance with control-traffic priorities in a control plane of a wireless network that includes a central switch and at least one wireless access points (APs), the control-traffic-prioritizing module comprising: a classification engine adapted to (i) receive, from the at least one wireless APs, a stream of signals comprising data signal and control signals, each control signal corresponding to a control-plane event applicable to data signals subsequently communicated over the wireless network; (ii) separate control signals from data signals; and (iii) classify, in the control plane of the wireless network, the separated control signals into a plurality of control signal types; a QOS-assignment module configured to assign the control-traffic priorities to the separated control signals based on the classified control signal types, wherein each control signal type is paired with a QOS value indicating a control-traffic priority, wherein the control signal types include at least one roaming type that is maintained at a control-signal priority higher than at least one non-roaming type control signal type, and wherein the QOS-assignment module comprises a session QOS table that includes pairs of control-signal type and QOS values; a message-tagging module configured to tag the separated control signals with the corresponding QOS values indicating the control-traffic priorities; a queuing module configured to en-queue the separated control signals that have been tagged by the QOS values indicating the control-traffic priorities; and a control-plane processing engine to process the separated control signals according to the tagged QOS values indicating the control-traffic priorities.