Abstract: A system and method for connecting two or more peripheral stations to a central station over a common service resource. Each station is connected to one or more switching units; the common service resource is adaptively shared as a function of traffic going to and from the switching units. In one embodiment, capacity in the common service resource is divided into a series of frames, each frame having a set number of time slices, with information form one or more of the switching units being transferred within a time slice. In one such embodiment, time slices which will not be used during a particular frame due to the lack of or repetitive nature of information from a particular switching unit can be used to transfer information from a different switching unit.