A Switching Network for Integrated Voice/Data/Video Services

This paper proposes an interconnection network for telecommunications switching system that integrates voice, data, and video. The switching system consists of a large number of modules geographically distributed over a small area (campus, building, industrial park, etc.) tied together by an interconnection network. The interconnection network is based on a slotted ring. 

To accommodate an extremely high traffic volume, a number of identical fiber rings can be used. The time slot is the basic information transfer mechanism employed by the interconnect network. Voice and video communication take place over reserved circuits, while variable length data packets are transferred over unallocated time slots. A circuit of a given rate is created by allocating the appropriate number of slots are marked busy by the source module. 

The unallocated time slots form a dynamically varying wideband transmission pipe over which data packets are transferred. A monitoring mechanism in each source module ensures that the number of time slots allocated to circuit connections does not exceed some preset maximum, thereby ensuring that some minimal bandwidth for packet traffic is always available. A token scheme is used to resolve contention among packet sources.