A method and an apparatus for shaping the output traffic in a fixed length cell switching network node

摘要

A method and an apparatus for shaping the output traffic in the transmit part of an network node adapter equipped with output lines. The network node supports fixed length cell switching user information traffics between a source unit and a destination unit; the invention uses two lookup tables called the active and the standby calendars (959,957) per one of said output line, each entry in the calendars representing the position of one cell in the output cell stream which will be sent onto said output lines; In the preferred embodiment three parameters tables (935,947,949) are used to store the information on the user traffics in the descending order of their bandwidth share negotiated at traffic establishment time; controlled by the control device (940), the placement device (950) places the entries in the standby calendar reserved for each traffic; once filled up the standby calendar is swapped to the active calendar; the active calendar is continuously read and the corresponding cells are sent onto the output line by the transmit device (970).