Distributed switching architecture

摘要

A system and method is disclosed for linking remote telecommunications ports connected to remote nodes wherein the functionality of a centralized switching system is distributed among the remote nodes. A multichannel bus couples the remote nodes to each other. In a preferred embodiment, the transmit channels of selected remote ports are permanently assigned to specified channels within the bus while the receive channels of the remote ports are permitted to float between all of the bus channels. In this distributed architecture, each node may receive a request from an associated port for a connection to another port. Each node is capable of performing the switching connections locally resulting in less message protocol being passed between nodes.