Alcatel Cit

Rene Coutin

Marc Dieudonne

Georges Thiebaut

Pierre Parmentier

Patrick Frene

Didier Helou

Jean-Yves Peron

The invention relates to a switching network enabling a plurality of bothway I/O links to be interconnected. In one embodiment of the invention, the network includes at least two nodes, each node possessing not more than k incident I/O points, k.gtoreq.2, n sets of k extended I/O points, n.gtoreq.2, and extension/concentration devices enabling each of the k incident I/O points to be connected to one of the extended I/O points of each of the n sets. Each bothway I/O link is capable of being connected to one of the incident I/O points of one of the nodes, and each node is associated with a bothway switching matrix having k I/O ports. The nodes are interconnected in pairs by first and second one-way switching matrices each having k input ports and k output ports.

Switching network for interconnecting bothway input/output links, use

A central switching facility is constituted by two switching networks connected to each of the connection units via two connection circuits. A connection circuit selects on a timeslot-by-timeslot basis which output network link is to be used for conveying each time slot to the connection unit. On an instruction from the switching network, a connection circuit operates, in a message mode, on one of the time slots selected from those which it processes, and it sends monitoring information to the switching network via control bits in that time slot. An instruction bit, selecting a message mode or a normal mode, is included in each frame transmitted from the switching network to a connection circuit.

Interconnection system for interconnecting connection units and a

Growing community of inventors

Guingamp, France

Rene Coutin