Patent ID: 6967948

Claim:
A signaling architecture for a cross connect switch including line modules having in-band payload data connections to at least one switch module, each of the line modules including a framer and at least some of the framers receiving a high rate signal with payload data and status information, the payload data being sent to the switch module via the in-band payload data connections, the signaling architecture comprising: out-of-band communication channels operatively connected between each of the line modules and the at least one switch module, said out-of-band communication channels being separate from the in-band payload data connections; a line module controller associated with each of the line modules and operatively connected to the corresponding framer, said line module controller receiving status information from the corresponding framer for each low rate signal contained within the high rate signal; said line module controllers transmitting the status information to the switch module via said out-of-band communication channels; said switch module receiving the status information from said line module controllers via said out-of-band communication channels, wherein the switch module includes a switch module controller, said line module controllers transmitting the status information to the switch module controller of the switch module via said out-of-band communication channels; said switch module controller receiving the status information from said line module controllers and making switching decisions based on the status information received via said out-of-band communication channels, wherein the status information is extracted from overhead data in the high rate signals being received by the framers, wherein the high rate signal being received by the framers is a SONET-compliant or SDH-compliant signal, wherein the status information includes LOS (Loss Of Signal), LOF (Loss of Frame), LOP (Loss of Pointer), K1, K2, B1, and/or B3 bytes.