Abstract: The invention generally concerns the issue of providing connectivity between two different address realms, generally referred to as an inside realm and an outside realm, by establishing connections through an intermediate gateway. The gateway normally has a number of outside-realm gateway addresses for enabling representation of inside-realm nodes in the outside realm. In a first aspect, support for flexible outside-realm initiated connections is enabled by dynamically establishing new gateway connection states triggered, for each new connection, by a respective user-resource identifier query initiated from a corresponding outside node. In a second aspect of the invention, intelligent use of predetermined connection information in the process of setting up new gateway connection states makes it possible to significantly increase the number of connections that can be simultaneously supported by the gateway using a limited number of outside-realm addresses.

Abstract: The present invention relates to arrangements for charging in a packet switched network. Packets are charged differently dependent on which service flow the packets belong to. The charging system comprises a control system and a serving element residing in a packet forwarding system wherein said control system comprises an account function adapted to manage an account of at least one user and a charging policy decision point arranged to calculate a charging policy for allowed services for the at least one user. Moreover, said serving element comprises a token bucket per user adapted to store reservations received from the account function of the user associated with the token bucket and a charging policy enforcement point arranged to perform charging for a plurality of the allowed services by reducing the stored reservation of the token bucket according to the calculated charging policy.

Abstract: The invention generally concerns the issue of providing connectivity between two different address realms, generally referred to as an inside realm and an outside realm, by establishing connections through an intermediate gateway. The gateway normally has a number of outside-realm gateway addresses for enabling representation of inside-realm nodes in the outside realm. In a first aspect, support for flexible outside-realm initiated connections is enabled by dynamically establishing new gateway connection states triggered, for each new connection, by a respective user-resource identifier query initiated from a corresponding outside node. In a second aspect of the invention, intelligent use of predetermined connection information in the process of setting up new gateway connection states makes it possible to significantly increase the number of connections that can be simultaneously supported by the gateway using a limited number of outside-realm addresses.