Patent ID: 7983297

Claim:
A method for optimizing network bandwidth utilization, comprising: receiving at a network gateway a stream of information formatted for transmission over a first sub-network of the network and receiving a stream of information only formatted for transmission over a second sub-network of the network; terminating the stream of information formatted for transmission over the first sub-network to form a stream of terminated frames and terminating the stream of information formatted for transmission over the second sub-network by extracting only header and payload information from the formatted information to form a stream of extracted frames; modifying the stream of extracted frames by adding a condensed IP header to each of the extracted frames to create an IP packet and encapsulating the IP packet in a point-to-point protocol multiplex format to form a point-to-point protocol frame; statistically aggregating the stream of terminated frames with the modified stream of extracted frames to form a statistically aggregated stream of frames; and transmitting the statistically aggregated stream of frames over the logical link from the first network gateway to a second network gateway in a manner that optimizes the use of the available bandwidth in the network.