ASYNCHRONOUS TRANSFER MODE EXCHANGE AND CELL PRIORITY CONTROL METHOD

摘要

PROBLEM TO BE SOLVED: To attain delicate and flexible priority control in response to a characteristics of information of various media and to attain efficient priority control in conformity with a transmission rate of each information with respect to various medium information. SOLUTION: An internal cell conversion section 31 of an ATM exchange 100 converts a cell received from a transmission line into an internal cell to which priority control information set in advance in the exchange is added. An ATM switch section 2 routes the internal cell and gives it to a priority control section 40. The priority control section 40 has a class unit buffer 401 provided in the unit of classes expressed by the priority control information, and applies priority control to the internal cell based on the priority control information added to the cell through the class unit buffer 401. An internal cell conversion section 41 converts the internal cell after priority control into a conventional ATM cell without the priority control information and outputs the ATM cell to a transmission line.