Patent ID: 8446820

Claim:
An apparatus for reducing congestion in a communications network, the apparatus comprising: a persistence module operative to generate a persistence value P 0 (N) for an emergency services access attempt a comparator operative to allow a user to access the communications network when a pseudorandom number is less than the persistence value, wherein P 0 (N) can assume any values smaller than or equal to 1 and larger than or equal to P(N), where P(N) is a persistence value for a non-emergency services access attempt; and a decision module operative to determine whether ASC=0; the persistence module being operative to calculate a first persistence P 0 (N) value when ASC=0, and a second persistence value P(N)=P 1 (N) that is less than the first persistence value otherwise, the first persistence value being a monotonically decreasing function of the emergency services access parameter W, where the emergency services access parameter W is a constant value (real number) that could have values anywhere in the range [0, 1] and need not be exactly 0 or 1, such that P 0 (N)=1 when the emergency services access parameter W=0, and such that P 0 (N)=P 1 (N) when the emergency services access parameter W=1, where P 1 (N)=2 −(N−1) and where N is transmitted in a system information message, the value of the emergency services access parameter W being selected results in a value of P 0 (N), such that the value P 0 (N) is a persistence value used to determine whether a user may access the communications network, wherein P 0 (N)=1−W+W*P(N).