Abstract: In a communication system comprising node stations connected to a bus, a headend unit releases, for sequentially numbered cycles, time slots as previously requested in an order pad passing procedure. In the order pad procedure, the headend issues a special frame in which stations insert the number of slots required to transmit data in a subsequent cycle. To enable reuse of time slots which otherwise would be utilized only during a fraction of their existence (i.e. from a source to a destination which in many cases are located close together), the order pad additionally includes a furthest destination label (DST-MAX) and a requested maximum (REQ-MAX) which are updated at each node. This allows to set, for any cycle, at some nodes a reuse flag (REU-FLG). In this way, the bus is partitioned into sections according to actual traffic, and the headend only releases a number of time slots which satisfies the needs of the section where the maximum of time slots was requested. Thus, the number of time slots, i.e.