Patent ID: 8249080

Claim:
A method for transmitting Ethernet data in Optical Transport Network (OTN) data streams, the method comprising: at a transmitter, accepting a serial data stream of digital information in an Ethernet format at a first data rate; unbundling the Ethernet format serial stream into n virtual information streams of packetized data, each virtual information stream having a second data rate equal to (the first data rate/n); for each of the n virtual information streams, transporting the information stream of packetized data via a corresponding X_Attachment Unit Interface-like (XAUI-like) interface, where each XAUI-like interface uses the same protocol as XAUI but is able to operate at higher data rates; for each of the n virtual information stream, framing the packets in an OTN format; and transmitting the framed data via n network branches at the second data rate.