Bandwidth management method and circuit, communication apparatus, communication system, and dual-queue network unit

摘要

A bandwidth management circuit in a communication system assigns time slots to constant-bit-rate signal sources and burst signal sources sharing a common communication channel. When a burst signal source has information to transmit, it is assigned time slots in fixed-length bursts of consecutive or nearly consecutive time slots. The bandwidth management circuit has a burst scheduler that requests these time slots, generating consecutive requests during each burst. Each burst is followed by an interval in which no requests are generated. The bandwidth management circuit can be used in communication equipment connected to several network units in a star topology. Each network has a constant-bit-rate queue and/or a burst queue storing information to be transmitted to the communication equipment.