Abstract: A backplane for a dynamic synchronous transfer mode network that comprises two dual ring topologies having opposite fiber direction. The ring topologies has a plurality of disjointed segments that permits the simultaneous transmission of signals in the same time slots over the disjointed segments.

Abstract: A device and method for mapping 65-bit DTM slots onto an optical network system that is based on bytes of 8 bits is described. The 64 data bits of each DTM slot are separated from the single control bit. The data bits are then grouped into a set of 8-bit bytes while all the single control bits are grouped into separate control byte groups. The separation of the data bytes from the control bytes eliminates the need for 8B10B encoding and the number of DTM slots may be adapted to the particular optical network used so that the number of bits of the DTM slots is an integral multiple of the size of the optical network interface.