Patent ID: 7009995

Claim:
A method for communication among equal-access stations of a ring-shaped, serial fiber-optic bus, comprising: during one bus cycle, a predetermined one of the stations generating strictly time-cyclical container messages, addressing the container messages, and supplying the container messages to the bus, the predetermined one of the stations supplying a synchronization message to the bus as an end message of the bus cycle; each one of the stations writing respective data in the container messages addressed to the one of the stations; each one of the stations reading data of written-in container messages on the serial bus as a function of a read authorization of the one of the stations; each one of the stations communicating only with the bus, due to source addressing of the written respective data and each one of the stations having direct-access read authorization of the respective data written by each one of the stations; each one of the stations reading the synchronization message and generating a respective interrupt as a function of the synchronization message, wherein depending on a respective position of each one of the stations, the respective interrupt being time delayed so that all of the respective interrupts are output in a time-synchronous manner; and further processing the read data when the respective interrupts are output.