Patent ID: 6975649

Claim:
A method of transporting an input signal through a hyper-concatenated connection between a start node and an end node in a network, the input signal having a variable user-selected concatenation, the method comprising steps of: a) receiving the input signal at the start node and splitting the input signal into a plurality of derived signals independently of the concatenation of the input data signal; b) transmitting the derived signals as hyper-concatenated data streams within respective ones of a plurality of independent channels, at least one of the hyper-concatenated data streams being routed through a pointer processing state machine that is independent of a pointer processing state machine through which another one of the hyper-concatenated data streams is routed; and c) recombining the derived signals at the end node to form an output signal equivalent to the input signal; wherein splitting the input signal into a plurality of derived signals comprises a step of inspecting an overhead of each frame of the input signal to determine whether the overhead contains a payload pointer or a concatenation indicator.