Patent ID: 7307957

Claim:
A method of establishing virtual connections for transmission of packets of internal traffic in a broadband telecommunication switch comprising a switching fabric having a plurality of indexed ports, the switching fabric switching an internal traffic packet applied to an input port to the output port indicated in the packet, a plurality of processor units, an operation and maintenance unit which includes an application for communication with the processor units, a plurality of multiplexers, each connected to its own input port of the switching fabric and multiplexing internal traffic packets into said input port, the internal traffic packets arriving from a group of processor units connected to the multiplexer, said method further comprising the steps of: generating, in each multiplexer, probe packets addressed to every indexed port of the switching fabric, each probe packet containing an index of an associated port; sending the probe packets to the switching fabric; receiving probe packets from the switching fabric; concluding that the multiplexer has been connected to that indexed port of the switching fabric whose index is indicated in the received probe packets; and establishing virtual connections between each of the multiplexers and the operation and maintenance unit by binding connection identifiers with indexes of the ports indicated in the received probe packets.