ATM THROTTLING

When data cells are transmitted from a station and the cells belong to different logical connections, derived from various logical or physical sources, each source and thus connection may require a particular transmission rate, which is not to be exceeded. Then for each one of a number of successive time slots a queue is arranged, the first current queue being the one pointed to by a pointer. The time slot queues comprise in a consecutive order, identifiers of those connections for which a data cell is to be transmitted. The first position in such a queue indicates the connection, for which a data cell is to sent with the highest degree of priority. The following positions indicate connections which have lower degrees of priority in a decreasing order. The first data cell in the time slot queue (No. 1) as pointed to by the pointer is then transmitted from the station and a cell belonging to the same connection is added to that other queue (No. n+1), which has an adapted distance from the considered queue in the sequential order of queues, where this distance is calculated from the transmission rate for the connection, to which the transmitted cell belongs. After that the remaining part of the first queue (No. 1) is transferred to the next queue (No. 2) and placed in front of the all the items in this next queue. The first queue (No. 1) is thus empty and the pointer is stepped to point to this next queue (No. 2).