Method of asynchronous transfer mode (ATM) switching and an ATM switching equipment

An ATM switching equipment using a fast reservation protocol with a resource management cell located at the head of an ATM cell burst stream and including information of a total number of cells consisting the ATM cell burst transmitted from an ATM subscriber apparatus, said ATM switching equipment comprising;

• a buffer for storing cells of an ATM cell burst received;
• a buffer monitoring circuit for monitoring a number of idle slots in the buffer available for storing cells;
• and
• a resource management cell processing circuit for discriminating a resource management cell in an ATM cell burst stream being received, extracting information of a total number of cells in the ATM cell burst from the resource management cell, comparing the total number of incoming cells in the ATM burst and the number of idle slots available in the buffer with each other, determining the number of cells to be stored and passing cells to the buffer as the result of comparison, discarding rest of cells and issuing a notification to the ATM subscriber apparatus of a number of cells to be retransmitted by the ATM subscriber apparatus.

An ATM switching equipment using a fast reservation protocol with a resource management cell located at the head of an ATM cell burst stream and including information of a total number of cells consisting the ATM cell burst transmitted from an ATM subscriber apparatus, said ATM switching equipment comprising;

• a resource management cell detecting circuit for discriminating a resource management cell in an ATM cell burst stream being received, and extracting information of a total number of cells in the ATM cell burst from the resource management cell;
• a buffer for storing cells of the ATM cell burst received;
• a buffer monitoring circuit for monitoring a number of idle slots in the buffer available for storing cells;
• a comparing circuit for comparing the total number of incoming cells in the ATM burst and the number of idle slots available in the buffer with each other, as a result of the comparison, determining the number of cells to be stored in the buffer, and instructing a gate to pass the determined number of cells and discarding the rest of the cells;
• a resource management cell generating circuit, for generating a resource management cell for providing a notification to the ATM subscriber unit of the number of cells to be retransmitted by the ATM subscriber apparatus.