A telecommunications environment includes two or more entities that are interconnected and communicate through various telecommunications services. The entities are interconnected to allow communication of information back and forth. Telecommunications networks provide the means for communication of voice, video, facsimile or computer data information between separate entities connected to the networks. A particular telecommunications network may provide support for one or more of these types of telecommunications information.
In many telecommunications networks, the interconnections between entities are implemented by a bus connecting the entities. Generally, buses may be time multiplexed such that the data stream passing along the bus is divided into time slots, and information from one entity to another is transmitted in these discrete time slots. The telecommunications information transmitted between entities breaks down into two broad types of services, namely asynchronous and isochronous services. Isochronous services require predictable periodic access to a network bus. Asynchronous services by contrast are all those that support bursty information types such as, for instance, packet services or asynchronous transfer mode (ATM) circuit emulation. Many bus implementations are dedicated solely to one of these two types of services.
There do exist some bus structures that support transmission of both isochronous and asynchronous service formats. For example, some ring bus structures, such as a slotted ring, dedicate some bus time slots to isochronous and some bus time slots to asynchronous service formats. Other non-ring bus structures also dedicate each bus time slot to either isochronous or asynchronous service formats. In both the ring bus structures and non-ring bus structures, a control message must be sent to each entity on the network to change the map of the bus time slots. This causes disruption of communication while administration overhead processes the mapping change.