Patent ID: 6996095

Claim:
A communications network, comprising: a communications medium carrying a synchronous communications transport signal including a plurality of time-division-multiplexed (TDM) channels; at least three bridges, each bridge having an interface to an associated one of a plurality of local area network (LAN) segments; and a plurality of add-drop circuits, each add-drop circuit being associated with a corresponding different one of the bridges and coupling the associated bridge to the communications medium, each add-drop circuit being operative to (i) group a plurality of the TDM channels of the communications transport signal into a bundle, (ii) schedule the use of the bundle to carry data traffic originated by the associated bridge and to carry data traffic originated by the other bridges, by allocating bandwidth of the bundle to the associated bridge based on a predetermined bandwidth allocation for the associated bridge, (iii) in accordance with the scheduling, transmit data traffic originated by the associated bridge and destined for at least one of the other bridges on the bundle, (iv) receive data traffic from at least one of the other bridges via the bundle, (v) determine whether the received data traffic from the at least one of the other bridges is destined for the associated bridge, and if so then forward such received data traffic to the associated bridge, and (vi) if at least some of the received data traffic is destined for one of the other bridges, then, in accordance with the scheduling, re-transmit such received data traffic on the bundle for receipt by the add-drop circuit associated with the destination bridge.