Patent ID: 7680128

Claim:
A method for interfacing high-layer applications to a Link Capacity Adjustment Scheme (LCAS) signaling protocol on Synchronous Optical Network/Synchronous Digital Hierarchy (SONET/SDH) edge nodes for efficient traffic flow control, the method comprising: encapsulating packet payloads into SONET/SDH containers using a Generic Framing Procedure (GFP) protocol; dividing the SONET/SDH containers into Virtual Containers (VCs) that are part of a Virtual Concatenated Groups (VCG) using a Virtual Concatenation (VCAT) protocol; hitlessly, dynamically, and selectively adding/removing members to/from the VCG using the LCAS signaling protocol; monitoring the operational condition of and selectively assigning a state to time-slots associated with the VCG and one or more diverse routes using a Time-Slot Manager; and providing an interface for users to specify the VCG in terms of time-slots and communicating time-slot changes between the Time-Slot Manager and the LCAS signaling protocol using a VCG Manager; wherein the Time-Slot Manager manages all of the time-slots, and wherein the Time Slot Manager provides an interface to the high-level applications thereby making VCG and LCAS operations transparent to the high-level applications.