Traffic intermixing mechanism for fast circuit switching.

摘要

A method and apparatus for intermixing circuit and packet data on a shared transmission medium. With this invention, the history of gaps between transmitted circuit frames is used to predict future gap sizes. If the size of a predicted gap is larger than the size of a frame of packet data to be transmitted, then the packet data is inserted in the next gap. If a circuit data frame arrives before the completion of transmission of a packet frame, the circuit data will be stored in an insertion buffer until completion of transmission of the packet frame. <IMAGE>