Customer access protocols for integrated services digital networks

After an introduction to the latest trends in the conception of local digital networks offering a variety of services including data and telephony, the interaction between customer access protocols and network architectures are discussed. The basic features of a customer-to-network signalling scheme that allows the full treatment of circuit-switched data calls at 64 kbit/s by the PCM local and trunk exchanges are presented, and the processing of packet-switched data calls by specialized network nodes accessed on demand via PCM facilities are discussed.