Patent ID: 7639662

Claim:
A communications system, comprising: a plurality of transceiver nodes configured to utilize a time division multiple access structure to communicate between the plurality of transceiver nodes, each transceiver node generating congestion metric information based on the utilization of a link to each of its neighbors; a route management module configured to combine the congestion metric information generated by the plurality of transceiver nodes into a congestion report; the route management module configured to combine routing information for each transceiver node and the congestion report into a plurality of node routing and congestion reports, the route management module is configured to transmit one of the plurality of node routing and congestion reports to each transceiver node based on the routing information; the time division multiple access structure including a plurality of time slots during which the plurality of transceiver nodes are configured to communicate data cells, the data cells being transmitted from a transmission queue, the data cells including routing information and the congestion metric information; and wherein the congestion metric information is based on comparing cell counts against a total capacity of each link, a monitoring signal of a processor buffer availability, and a monitoring signal of priority queues capacity.