Patent ID: 7145916

Claim:
A communications network, comprising: a communications medium carrying a synchronous communications transport signal including a plurality of time-division-multiplexed (TDM) channels; at least three bridges, each bridge having an interface to an associated one of a plurality of local area network (LAN) segments; and a plurality of add-drop circuits, each add-drop circuit being associated with a corresponding different one of the bridges and coupling the associated bridge to the communications medium, each add-drop circuit being operative to (i) group the TDM channels of the communications transport signal into bundles, each bundle being associated with a corresponding different one of the bridges, (ii) transmit data traffic originated by the associated bridge and destined for at least one of the other bridges on only the bundle associated with the associated bridge, (iii) receive data traffic from the other bridges via the bundles associated with the other bridges, (iv) forward at least some of the received data traffic to the associated bridge, and (v) re-transmit at least some of the received data traffic on the bundles for receipt by at least another one of the add-drop circuits.