Patent ID: 7751726

Claim:
A method comprising: receiving an optical signal at an optical receiver device; converting said optical signal to an electrical signal; storing a list of a plurality of possible optical signal types; automatically identifying a clock rate of said electrical signal, wherein said automatically identifying comprises: converting the electrical signal to a serial data stream of digital samples; demultiplexing the serial data stream to a parallel data stream; obtaining a rough clock signal from the parallel data stream; applying the rough clock signal to a phase lock loop in a clock recovery circuit to obtain a clean clock signal; for a signal type in the stored list, determining a difference between a frequency of the clean clock signal and a frequency of a reference clock; determining a clock rate of the received optical signal based on the difference; and using the clock rate to identify an optical signal type among the plurality of possible optical signal types of the received optical signal; based on the optical signal type determined for the received optical signal, selecting one of a plurality of traffic processing methods to further process said electrical signal, and selecting one of a plurality of performance monitoring methods to monitor quality of said optical signal.