Negotiation of datapath treatment for end-to-end interworked network traffic

Abstract

The invention provides a method for negotiating datapath treatment for traffic sourced from a first communications network over an end-to-end path in respect of a path segment provided for said traffic in a second communications network, the path segment being requested for a first node of the second communications network and being targeted to a second node of the second communications node. The method comprises: for the first node, notifying that a datapath capability for the path segment is one for selection for the second node; communicating datapath capabilities associated with the first node; selecting, for the second node, a datapath capability from the datapath capabilities so communicated; communicating the datapath capability so selected for the second node back to the first node; and wherein the path segment is established using a signaling protocol of the second communications network. The invention may also be implemented in a corresponding communications node.

Dependencies are inferred from the claim text.