Alcatel Lucent

Joerg Pleickhardt

Werner Beisel

Christian Hermsmeyer

In order to provide a network element for switching time-division multiplex signals in a transport network, which allows higher capacity at moderate equipment costs, the network element has a number of input ports (I; IO-IO), a number of output ports (O; IO-IO) and a switch fabric ( ) SF;) interconnecting the input and output ports (IO-IO). The switching fabric ( ) SF;) is a cell based switch comprising one or more switch modules ( ) SE-SEn) which are adapted to switch fixed-length cells on the basis of addresses contained in cell headers of the cells. The input ports (I) contain a segmentation device () for segmenting an input time-division multiplex signal into fixed-length cells and assigning address information to each cell. The output ports (O) contain a reassembly device () for reassembling cells received from said switch fabric (SF;) into an output time-division multiplex signal. The address information contains a fabric address (H, H) and a TDM address (P, P). The switch fabric switches the cells in accordance with the fabric address (H, H) to a corresponding output port (O) and the reassembly device () reassembles the cells in accordance with the TDM address (P, P).

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Heroldsberg, Germany

Joerg Pleickhardt