Patent ID: 7124202

Claim:
A method comprising: assigning a plurality of segment IDs to a plurality of channels associated with a plurality of digitized segments of data; determining a boundary number that represents a number of segment IDs to be aggregated into a first section and a number of corresponding digitized segments of data to be aggregated into a second section; aggregating the determined boundary number of segment IDs into the first section, wherein the segment IDs share a destination node, wherein aggregating comprises, if the number of segment IDs that share the destination node is less than the boundary number of segment IDs, adding an inactive segment ID so the number of segment IDs is equal to the boundary number of segment IDs; aggregating the determined boundary number of digitized segments of data into the second section, wherein each aggregated digitized segment of data in the second section is associated with a segment ID in the first section, wherein aggregating comprises, if an inactive segment ID is added, adding an associated inactive data segment; combining the first section and the second section into a packet segment; appending a network header to the packet segment to create a multi-channel packet; and transmitting the multi-channel packet over a network.