Patent ID: 7382805

Claim:
A method comprising: receiving two or more Ethernet streams from a media access control (MAC) layer of separate media independent interfaces; modifying one or more Ethernet streams of the received Ethernet streams in a physical coding sublayer (PCS) to uniquely distinguish each of the two or more Ethernet streams one from another, wherein the two or more Ethernet streams share a single transmit character clock reference, and wherein said modifying comprises: generating identifiers to uniquely identify each of the one or more Ethernet streams; inserting each of the identifiers into a particular IDLE ordered set; and inserting the particular IDLE ordered set into one or more inter-packet gaps between packets of each of the one or more Ethernet streams; and interleaving any two or more of the modified Ethernet streams to form an aggregate Ethernet stream after inserting the particular IDLE ordered set into the one or more Ethernet streams.