Patent ID: 7356052

Claim:
A method for handling of overhead (OH) bytes of an incoming high order data stream to form a corresponding outgoing data stream, the method comprising a) presenting the incoming data stream as a plurality of N lower order component data streams transmitted in parallel, b) providing a common overhead processing unit (COHPU) capable of handling overhead bytes of a single one of said component data streams, c) forwarding overhead bytes of said component data streams to said COHPU in a circular order, while keeping docketing (ID) information for each particular overhead byte d) processing each of the overhead bytes in the COHPU, at a bit rate of said component data stream, and e) modifying the N component data streams to obtain the corresponding outgoing data stream based on results of the processing and the ID information with respect to each of the processed overhead bytes; wherein the processing step (d) comprises: completing and keeping said docketing (ID) information including the number of a component data stream to which each particular OH byte belongs, successively forwarding each particular received OH byte to an operator block corresponding to the type of said particular overhead byte and the kind of processing required for the byte, said operator blocks forming part of said common overhead processing unit, and obtaining results of the processing of each particular OH byte in the form of at least one instruction selected from a list comprising alarms, operations with the particular overhead byte in the outgoing data stream and operations with other bytes in the outgoing data stream.