| 摘要 |
The invention relates to a switching fabric arrangement for a packet-switched telecommunications network. Packets arriving at the switching fabric are assigned a time stamp depending on their time of arrival. Time stamp information relating to the packets to be transported is transmitted to at least some of the switching elements, and in at least some of the switching elements, the relative order of the packets to be sent is established on the basis of the received time stamp information in such a way that on each outgoing link (IL) from the switching element, the packets are in the sequence indicated by the time stamps. To enable the re-sequencing the be implemented simply and further in such a manner that the switching fabric can be easily expanded, a predetermined number of discrete values are used as time stamps, and in switching elements in which the relative order of the packets to be sent is established on the basis of the time stamps (a) time stamp-related buffers (RSB) are used, (b) incoming packets are stored in the time stamp-related buffers in such a way that at least each packet arriving from outside the switching fabric is stored in the buffer corresponding to its time stamp, and (c) the time stamp-related buffers are read one buffer at a time to be empty and each packet that is read out is routed to the output indicated by the address contained therein. |
