A distributed spread-spectrum network, comprising remote stations and
nodes. One or more hub node(s) connect(s) to a central telephone office.
A node's spread-spectrum transceiver communicates, using packets having
spread-spectrum modulation, over radio waves, with the remote stations.
Each packet has a source address and a destination address, and may have
other information such as a header, start of message, end of message,
flow-control information, forward error correction, and message data. A
store-and-forward subsystem stores and forwards one or more packets to
and from the remote station. The store-and-forward subsystem stores and
forwards the one or more packets to and from another node. A flow-control
subsystem controls the store-and-forward subsystem, to store each packet
arriving at the spread-spectrum transceiver. The flow-control subsystem
communicates traffic information between each of the nodes. The
flow-control subsystem routes the packet through appropriate nodes to the
hub node from a remote station. Based on the traffic at each node, the
flow-control subsystem transmits the packet from the hub node to an
appropriate node, and routes the packet to a recipient remote station.
The flow-control subsystem routes the plurality of packets through a path
in the plurality of nodes to ensure that the plurality of packets arrive
sequentially for voice or video packets.