Racal Data Communications Inc.

Sensormatic Electronics Corporation

Tyco Fire + Security Gmbh

David B Fallin

Scott Alan Tribbey

Donald Lee Wray

John J Clark

Robert Kevin Lynch

Edward J Sackman, Iii

John Clark

Craig A Lee

John Jay Clark

Scott A Tribbey

Jose Ramos

Sean Ryan

Joseph P Cosette

A method and apparatus for providing communication among N modules connected to a common communication bus uses a bus structure with a reserve line for signaling the occurrence of a reservation time slot during which time each of the N modules which have information to transmit may reserve a time for transmission over the bus. A plurality of at least N data lines are used for transmission of data words over the bus. Each of the N modules are also assigned use of one of the plurality of data lines for signaling during the reservation time slot that the module has information to transmit over the bus. The reserve line is also used for signaling, that a word of data being transmitted over the plurality of data lines is a last word in a current transmission to be transmitted by the module currently transmitting.

High speed module interconnection bus

A method and apparatus for assigning time slots in a frame of time slots used for time division multiplexing, the time slots being representable as a position within the frame, in which it is determined what quantity of the time slots are required to provide a needed amount of bandwidth. A random number generator (40) generates (92) a uniformly distributed random number which is scaled (94) to represent a position in the first portion of the frame. A first of the positions within the frame is assigned based upon the value of the randon number. The remaining positions are assigned by fitting (64) the remaining required positions to the available positions in the frame spacing them at approximately equally spaced intervals as available. This prevents bunching of the used time solts which would otherwise prevent dynamic allocation of large blocks of bandwidth in the frame without complete recalculation of the frame.

Multiplexer with dynamic bandwidth allocation

Growing community of inventors

Sunrise, FL, United States of America

David B Fallin