COMBINED TERMINAL ADAPTER FOR SMDS AND FRAME RELAY HIGH SPEED DATA SERVICES

A terminal adapter interfaces between a Data Terminating Equipment (DTE) and either a Frame Relay (FR) or a Switched Multimegabit Data Service (SMDS) telecommunications network so that the type of network over which the DTE is communicating is transparent to the DTE. The TA performs mapping from one protocol to another so that a native FR DTE can access an SMDS network and so that a native SMDS DTE can access a FR network. The address mapping method performed by the TA uses a parallel table look-up technique which reduces the chance of collision (when two or more addresses hash into the same table entry), eliminates the traditional comparison function to detect a collision, and eliminates the traditional pointer technique when a collision occurs.