Patent ID: 7420973

Claim:
A method, comprising: performing authentication, authorization and accounting for a subscriber desiring to connect to a plurality of services on different contexts; establishing bindings to a plurality of contexts for said subscriber based on said performing, wherein each of the plurality of contexts operates as a virtual router in one network element; receiving a traffic packet from said subscriber; accessing at least certain header information from said traffic packet; selecting one of said plurality of contexts based on at least certain of the accessed header information, wherein said selecting comprises, determining if at least certain accessed header information is associated with a secondary one of the bindings, wherein one of the bindings is a primary binding and the rest of the bindings are secondary bindings, selecting one of the plurality of the contexts matching the secondary binding as the selected context if there is an association, and selecting a primary context matching the primary binding as the selected context if there is no association; and communicating said traffic packet to the selected context.