RADIO COMMUNICATION APPARATUS AND RADIO COMMUNICATION METHOD

A radio communication apparatus mounted on a mobile body establishes a local network using terminals and relays a packet transmitted and received between a predetermined terminal connected to the local network and a server connected to an external network, which is another network. The radio communication apparatus includes an uplink-traffic monitoring unit and a downlink-traffic monitoring unit to extract header information from packets received from the server and the terminal, a policy table that registers policy information indicating possibility of communication connection establishment for each combination of the server and the terminal and a priority degree of the communication connection, a priority-degree determining unit to determine whether relay processing for the packet is performed, and an uplink-traffic control unit and a downlink-traffic control unit to discard the received packet when the priority-degree determining unit determines that the relay processing is not performed.