Patent ID: 8300659

Claim:
A network comprising: at least one host device having an interface card connected to a backplane of said host device, said interface card comprising: at least one cage for receiving a pluggable module which is configured to perform a protocol mapping between an application protocol and a transport protocol, wherein said pluggable module is a MSA compatible pluggable module which comprises an integrated protocol mapping unit with a power consumption of less than 500 mW, and said integrated protocol mapping unit is formed by a field programmable gate array (FPGA), wherein for performing said protocol mapping from the application protocol to said transport protocol said pluggable module is configured to: separate management data and user data of said application protocol, perform a Generic Framing Procedure (GFP) based mapping of said user data into containers of said transport protocol, perform a concatenation of said containers to transport protocol frames each consisting of a header and payload, and to perform a direct mapping of said management data of said application protocol into the headers of said transport protocol frames, and wherein said pluggable module provides at least one embedded communication channel which is configured to exchange performance monitoring data and configuration data between said pluggable module and a far-end device.