Patent ID: 7289507

Claim:
A method for safely transporting an Ethernet signal through a pipe from a sending point to a receiving point over at least one synchronous digital hierarchy (SDH) or a synchronous optical networking (SONET) network, the at least one SDH/SONET network comprising network elements or nodes, fiber connections connecting the network elements and SDH/SONET virtual containers, the transport being managed through a new layer over SDH/SONET network physical layer, the new layer comprising Access Points, links of Access Point pairs and circuits, namely the possible routes for connecting a pair of Access Points, wherein the method comprises: at the sending point, receiving Ethernet frames to be transported through an Access Point; mapping the Ethernet frames into Virtual Containers; assigning a label to every frame according to a sequence; storing a copy of the sent labeled frames; and at the receiving point, receiving the sent labeled frames; re-ordering the received frames according to the assigned sequence label; updating the value of a pointer according to the label of the last correct frame of the sequence; and outputting the frames through an Access Point.