Abstract: The radio base station (BSI) in a cellular radio communication system such as a GSM system must perform considerable real time processing, e.g. for channel coding and decoding, which requires a considerable number of processors (SC01, SC02, OC0). For optimal deployment of the processors and to facilitate extensions and modifications of the system, the radio base station (BS1) has an internal arbitration bus (IPB) for coupling master and slave control units and signal processing units to the processors and to channel coders (CHC1, CHC2, CHC3, CHC4) or other resources. A master and slave arbitration system is thereby achieved wherein requests from master and slave units can be queued flexibly, and in which optimal use is made of available resources. By using a RAM table for assigning master and slave units to each other, further flexibility in use of resources is achieved. Adaptive polling of requesting units may be employed in order to increase system throughput.