Patent ID: 7656891

Claim:
A method for interleaving virtually concatenated and contiguously concatenated data, comprising: assigning a virtually concatenated data payload and a contiguously concatenated data payload to time slots in a received order in a first set of hardware data banks in a fiber optics network, wherein the virtually concatenated data payload is variable in size to match a client service data rate, and wherein the contiguously concatenated data payload is fixed in size; and distributing the data from time slots in the received order in the first set of hardware banks to time slots in a generic order in a second set of hardware data banks such that contiguous data is included in each time slot; wherein said distributing is performed by a control memory and comprises determining a group format for the data, determining time slots to be employed based on the group format, and allocating data to only those time slots to be employed based on the group format.