Lucent Technologies Inc.

Hai J Tan

Howard Zehua Chen

A method and apparatus for reducing bandwidth in an ATM network. The invention provides an ATM switch having a compression module for compressing ATM cell headers without affecting the virtual circuit established for the call. The compressed headers provide the ATM switch buffers with extra space to handle more cells for a given call. To realize the benefit of the extra space during transmission, the present invention provides a mapping interface between the PHY and ATM layers of the ATM communication. The mapping interface separates the compressed headers from the uncompressed headers into two different PHY payloads. The cells transmitted in the compressed payload are then expanded in an expansion module located in the call destination switch. The expansion module returns the compressed headers back to their original form.

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Phiilipsburg, NJ, United States of America

Hai J Tan