Patent ID: 6944163

Claim:
A method of transporting a high speed Ethernet data stream comprising a sequential series of media access control (MAC) frames and having a data rate of 10 Gb/s across a synchronous packet switched network fabric having a line rate of 9.953280 Gbaud, the method comprising the steps of: a) providing a synchronous container at a sending interface, the synchronous container having a line/column frame format conforming to a conventional synchronous optical network (SONET) frame format, and a stripped transport overhead (TOH) wherein the stripped TOH comprises only A1 and A2 octets of a conventional SONET frame TOH; b) compressing the Ethernet data stream to produce a compressed data stream; c) mapping the compressed data stream to the synchronous container; and d) launching the synchronous container across the network fabric toward a receiving interface.