| 摘要 |
<p>A communication bus snooper switch (28) includes an inbound cell queue coupled to receive ATM cells from a number of ATM physical layer interfaces (22) across a common inbound bus (26). An out-bound cell queue (which may be the same queue as the inbound cell queue when a dual port queue is used) is coupled to provide the ATM cells to separate ATM termination points according cell address information across separate out-bound busses (30a, 30b). Each of the out-bound busses is associated with one of the ATM termination points. The snooper switch (28) is configured to operate as an ATM bus master (32a) when communicating with the physical layer interfaces (22) and as a ATM bus slave (32b) when communicating with the ATM termination points. During transmit operations, cells from the various ATM termination points are queued in corresponding transmission cell queues within the snooper switch (28) and, thereafter, provided to the ATM physical layer interfaces (22) according to an arbitration scheme implemented at the snooper switch (28).</p> |
