Patent ID: 7944941

Claim:
A method for carrying medium access control (MAC) frames in a synchronous transport container, comprising: selecting a synchronous container for transporting a payload at a predetermined rate; generating a plurality of high speed (HS) MAC frames, generating an HS frame including: generating a link-layer HS frame wherein the preamble and start frame delimiter fields of an Ethernet frame are used for a length and a type fields wherein said length field includes: a length sub-field, indicating the length of said HS frame: a time-to-live subfield for limiting the looping of said HS frame in case of a fault; a label subfield for indicating a service and a path to said service; a per-hop behavior field indicating the quality of service for said data; and a congestion notification sub-field: and providing a physical layer HS frame by addition of a header error check HEC to said link-layer HS frame; and mapping said HS frames into said payload; wherein said synchronous container is a SONET/SDH carrier comprising a reduced-size transport overhead (TOH) wherein the reduced-size transport overhead (TOH) has a same structure as a standard SONET/SDH carrier TOH, but includes reduced overhead information; and wherein said mapping step comprises not using some defined bytes of the standard SONET/SDH carrier TOH.