摘要 |
An Asynchronous Transfer Mode (ATM) multiplexed data stream is terminated at a functional unit. Virtual channel data are being carried in cells in the data stream. A depacketizer has a plurality of cell buffers, each buffer storing the payload data contained in a single cell. The buffers are being loaded in sequence in accordance with a message sequence number carried by each cell and emptied in accordance with a depacketizer algorithm to form a non-continuous data stream. A fill-in cell format generator, on the failure of a valid cell to arrive, causes the replacement of the missing cell by a fill-in cell in the non-continuous data stream. A time-out function generator is started after each cell has been depacketized and sometimes after fill-in replacement cells have been generated. |