Abstract: In a switching system interconnecting transmission links (21-i, 23-i) on which circuit switched (CS) and packet switched (PS) information is transferred, a switch fabric (11) is provided which interconnects a plurality of input ports (15-i) to a plurality of output ports (19-i). The information arriving on incoming links is converted in switch adapters (13-i) to uniform minipackets, each having a routing address designating the required output port. The switch fabric consists of parallel equal switching slices, e.g. binary routing trees (71), which transfer in a non-blocking manner each minipacket from its input port to one output port in response to the routing address. Collecting means (73, 75) are provided at each output port for accepting the minipackets arriving from the different input ports.

Abstract: A method and a TDM multiplexer by which circuit-switched synchronous data and packet-switched asynchronous data are optimally combined for transmission over a common channel. Time slots of variable width are assigned to circuit-switched traffic, while the remaining capacity of the TDM frame is used for transmission of store-and-forward traffic which is inserted in the gaps between assigned time slots in the form of an intermittent bit stream.