Patent ID: 11924740
Assignee: NIPPON TELEGRAPH AND TELEPHONE CORPORATION
Field: Digital communication (Electrical engineering)
Classification: CPC H  Y | IPC H

Claim 5:
6. A signal forwarding method in a signal forwarding system comprising: a slave station; a master station; a plurality of signal forwarding devices forming a plurality of communication routes between the slave station and the master station; and a route control device that determines a communication route of a signal communicated between the slave station and the master station, wherein
the route control device performs at least: a communication route calculating process of calculating a forward destination communication route in response to a route switching request; and a forward destination setting instructing process of outputting forward destination setting information to the signal forwarding devices based on the communication route calculated in the communication route calculating process,
the signal forwarding devices perform at least: a forward destination setting instruction acquiring process of acquiring the forward destination setting information from the route control device; a forward destination setting process of changing a forward destination of the signal based on the forward destination setting information acquired in the forward destination setting instruction acquiring process; and a forwarding process of outputting input traffic based on the forward destination, and any of the route control device and the signal forwarding devices performs:
a traffic monitoring process of monitoring the traffic;
a non-signal period estimating process of estimating a non-signal period in which the traffic does not flow based on the traffic monitored in the traffic monitoring process; and
a switching timing control process of controlling a timing of switching the communication route to perform route switching in the non-signal period estimated in the non-signal period estimating process.