Patent ID: 9647761
Date: 2017-05-09
CPC Classifications: H04B,H04J

Claim:
1. An apparatus comprising: an interface to receive mapped client signals in higher order OPU frames; a framer coupled to the interface to frame the mapped client signals in each of the OPU frames into ODU frames and to frame the ODU frames into OTU frames, wherein the ODU frames and the OTU frames respectively comprise heterogeneous concatenations of multiple ODU frames and multiple OTU frames that are selected by the framer based on a target communication rate lower than a rate associated with the received OPU frames, and have a common frame structure with the received OPU frames and different rates, wherein the client signals are mapped to Tributary Slots in a payload of the OPU frames, wherein the framer is configured to fragment the payload of each of the OPU frames between Tributary Slots in a payload of the ODU frames, wherein the Tributary Slots in the payload of the OPU frames and the Tributary Slots in the payload of the ODU frames have the same associated rate, and wherein the payload of each of the ODU frames has a different number of Tributary Slots than the payload of the OPU frames.