Patent ID: 6862289

Claim:
A method of joint data transmission of digital source data and control data between data source and data sinks that are subscribers of a uni-directionally operated communication network having a ring configuration, said method comprising the step of: (a) transmitting, in a continuous data stream, the source data and the control data in a format which prescribes a clocked sequence of individual bit groups of the same bit width, the format having reserved predetermined bit positions; (b) sampling data by the subscribers with a first sampling frequency, the communication network samples data with a second sampling frequency, the second sampling frequency being an integral multiple of the first sampling frequency; (c) assigning, with each bit group at least one contiguous region having a predetermined number of reserved bit positions for source data, the contiguous region(s) being assigned to a subscriber address; and (d) assigning, with at least one contiguous region of a bit group, a significant bit position; wherein one of the subscribers is set to a first logic level and all the other subscribers are set to an opposed, second logic level.