Patent 11178057 was granted and assigned to Huawei on November, 2021 by the United States Patent and Trademark Office.
The present disclosure provides an offloading policy negotiation method and apparatus, so as to resolve problems in the prior art that a method for initiating data flow switching by UE has low applicability, and that a network side cannot control and manage the UE, and that user experience is reduced. The method includes: sending, by a first device, an offloading policy to a second device, where the offloading policy includes a default access indication and a routing rule; and receiving and storing, by the first device, an acknowledged offloading policy returned for the offloading policy by the second device, and transmitting a data flow based on the acknowledged offloading policy.