Patent ID: 7050439

Claim:
A method for performing discontinuous transmission in an asynchronous transfer mode ATM between a transcoder and a base transceiver station, comprising the steps of: performing a transmission of an ATM cell in a downlink direction each time a predetermined time period has expired, when signal frames indicating a speechless period are supplied; determining said predetermined time period by counting a predetermined number of said signal frames indicating a speechless period; performing an uplink transmission of an ATM cell only when a signal frame indicating a useful information has been supplied; wherein frames containing speech information are transmitted to an ATM connection via an ATM interface, whereas in case of frames containing a comfort noise information, only an ATM cell containing the first frame containing the comfort noise information is transmitted, wherein subsequent frames with comfort noise information lead to an initialization of a first counter and thereafter to a successive incrementation thereof until the first counter has counted to a defined value, wherein, when the defined value has been reached, an ATM cell containing the corresponding frame is transmitted to the ATM connection and the processing starts again as long as subsequent frames with comfort noise information are transmitted, wherein, in the uplink direction, when an ATM cell containing a frame indicating a timing alignment is received, a second counter is reset, and, with any subsequently received ATM cell, the second counter is incremented and the contained frame is passed to the transcoder until a predetermined count value has been reached, when no ATM cells are received after the initial synchronization of the second counter, frames with information indicating a bad frame are generated and the second counter is incremented until the count value reaches the predetermined value, and when ATM cells are received before the second counter has reached the predetermined value, the corresponding frames are passed to the transcoder while the second counter is still incremented with any received ATM cell.