Method and apparatus for scheduling cells based on pre-synchronized frames

摘要

A method for scheduling a plurality of cells of a call via a connection linking a multiplicity of nodes which include a source node and a destination node is provided. A frame counter which counts down the time slots of each frame to be reset to a frame size is assigned to each node of each connection. All the frame counters at all the nodes are pre-synchronized on a connection basis based on propagation delays and delay bounds so that each upstream count of the frame counter in the upstream node is previously correlated to a downstream count of the frame counter in the downstream node. So the eligible time of a cell at each node can be determined without delivering scheduling information from an upstream node to a downstream node. The synchronized queue for each connection includes logically separated two FIFO queues so that one FIFO queue stores an eligible cell ready to be scheduled for transmission while the other FIFO queue stores non-eligible cell that must be jitter-controlled until the end of the frame size.