A metropolitan area network based on asynchronous time sharing

A metropolitan area network is described that guarantees quality of service on the hardware level. The network supports three classes of traffic. Switching is based on the principle of asynchronous time sharing, i.e., the three traffic classes enter any switch fabric sequentially. The system architecture consists of a set of generic switch fabrics that are implemented as buses, rings, or link schedulers. A switching node typically consists of a ring that interconnects a set of access buses; these nodes are interconnected via T3/DS3 links. A flexible hardware design that supports the traffic control architecture in order to guarantee the quality of service as negotiated at call setup is also presented.<>