Patent ID: 6956857

Claim:
A packet based network providing a guaranteed admission and incremental bandwidth feature, a source user terminal and a destination user terminal connected to said network, the source user terminal transmitting a call setup message to said network requesting a connection to the destination user terminal, the call setup message containing an indicator that the call is a guaranteed admission and incremental bandwidth feature call, the call setup message containing an explicit or implicit maximum bandwidth request, said network comprising: one or more network nodes; said network operated to establish a call path between the source user terminal and the destination user terminal over said one or more network nodes; each of said one or more network nodes operated to recognize the guaranteed admission and incremental bandwidth feature indicator in calls requesting the feature; each of said one or more network nodes operated to preserve and convey the guaranteed admission and incremental bandwidth feature indicator in the call setup message to the next network node in the call path; each of said one or more network nodes operated to admit the guaranteed admission and incremental bandwidth feature call to the network with an initial bandwidth allocation that may be less than the maximum bandwidth requested in the session setup message; each of said one or more network nodes operated to automatically incrementally allocate to the guaranteed admission and incremental bandwidth feature call available user bandwidth up to the requested maximum bandwidth as bandwidth becomes available if the call was initially allocated less than the maximum bandwidth requested.