Patent ID: 7630382

Claim:
A system for managing circuit emulation service over an Asynchronous Transfer Mode (ATM) network, comprising: control logic configured to receive channelized circuit data, the channelized circuit data being transmitted at an arbitrary rate; control logic configured to format the channelized circuit data into one or more ATM cells, each ATM cell having a payload, the payload having a plurality of octets and corresponding validity fields, each validity field being associated with one octet of the plurality of octets, the validity field indicating whether the associated octet contains valid data, wherein the control logic is configured to selectively include data in a first subset of the plurality of octets and not include data in a second subset of the plurality of octets of each ATM cell of the one or more ATM cells so that transmission of the one or more ATM cells results in transmission of the channelized circuit data at the arbitrary rate, wherein the control logic is configured to set the validity fields associated with the first subset of the octets of the payload of each of the one or more ATM cells to a valid status to indicate that data is included in the first subset of octets, and wherein the control logic is further configured to set the validity fields associated with the second subset of the octets of the payload of each of the one or more ATM cells to an invalid status to indicate that no data is included in the second subset of octets; and control logic configured to transmit the one or more ATM cells across the ATM network; wherein the transmission of the one or more ATM cells effectively results in transmission of the channelized circuit data at the arbitrary rate over the ATM network; wherein the arbitrary rate is achieved by adjusting a ratio of a number of octets in the first subset of octets to a number of octets in the second subset of octets for each of the one or more ATM cells; and wherein the arbitrary rate is not a multiple of a fundamental rate.