Patent ID: 8072983

Claim:
A method for dispatching optical transport network (OTN) signals, wherein the OTN signals comprise a plurality of OTN signal frames with a frame period, wherein the method comprises: receiving, at a transmitting side, an OTN signal frame with a frame period sequence number, wherein the OTN signal frame comprises one or more sections and each section comprises a set of successive overhead bytes followed by a plurality of non-overhead bytes; splitting each section of the OTN signal frame by: determining whether the set of successive overhead bytes in the section includes frame alignment data; if the set of successive overhead bytes includes the frame alignment data, assigning the set to one of a plurality of channels based on the frame period sequence number of the OTN signal frame, in current frame period, or if the set of successive overhead bytes does not include the frame alignment data, storing the set in a buffer; and assigning each non-overhead byte in the section to one of the plurality of channels based on a location of the non-overhead byte in the section of the OTN signal frame, in current frame period; converting the assigned bytes in each channel of the plurality of channels from a parallel form to a serial form, and sending the bytes in the serial form in each channel to a receiving side; wherein the bytes in the serial form in each channel are converted by the receiving side to the bytes in the parallel form; and the receiving side performs a sink frame alignment on the bytes in the parallel form in each channel based on the frame alignment data contained in one of the sets of successive overhead bytes, and combines the aligned bytes in the parallel form in each channel for obtaining the OTN signal frame.