Patent ID: 7535893

Claim:
A method for operating a switching node, comprising: maintaining a packet-switched fabric that switches both time-division multiplexed (TDM) traffic and packet-based protocol data unit (PDU) traffic on the same fabric with packet switching; overlaying the packet-switching of the fabric with a repeating synchronized frame, the frame to allocate timeslots for switching the TDM traffic and the PDU traffic over the packet-switched fabric, including maintaining a timeslot-reservation table for TDM traffic, the table having a row of entries, each entry corresponding to a timeslot of the frame; prescheduling switching of the fabric for TDM traffic by populating the entries in the table according to a contention-free allocation to provide exclusive reservation of timeslots in the frame for cells of TDM traffic to provide deterministic switching of TDM traffic over the fabric based on the prescheduling of the frame; and scheduling switching of the fabric for PDU traffic by arbitration scheduling of available timeslots in the frame; and switching both the TDM traffic and the PDU traffic over the packet-switched fabric traffic in accordance with the repeating synchronized frame, including transmitting a cell on a timeslot in accordance with the populated table.