Patent ID: 7668196

Claim:
A method of facilitating communications between components of a communications environment, said method comprising: obtaining, by a protocol converter, a communication to be communicated from one component of the communications environment to another component of the communications environment, wherein the one component is of one protocol and the another component is of another protocol that differs from the one protocol, and wherein the communication is absent protocol specific data of the another protocol, said communication including a source identifier, a destination identifier and an information field including payload, said payload being in a format of the one protocol and comprising a plurality of fields including at least one of one or more flags, one or more counts and data; and translating, by the protocol converter, at least a portion of the communication from the one protocol to the another protocol, wherein the translating is performed absent modifications of the one component, and wherein the translating includes translating payload of the one protocol to payload corresponding to the another protocol, the translating of the payload including: determining that a field in the payload of the one protocol has no corresponding field in the another protocol; and performing an action to accommodate the field in the another protocol, the action transparent to the another component of the communications environment.