A method of packet prioritization at a data network is disclosed. The data network contains a number of data plane nodes carrying user traffic and a control node managing the data plane nodes. The method starts with receiving a packet at a data plane node. The data plane node determines that it needs help from the control node for processing the received packet. It then quantizes a congestion level at the data plane node and encoding the quantized congestion level in the packet, where a number of bits in the packet indicates the quantized congestion level. It sends a portion of the packet from the data plane node to the control node, where the portion of the packet includes the number of bits encoding the quantized congestion level.