Patent ID: 7415048

Claim:
A method comprising: receiving a SONET frame carrying time-slot interleaved payload segments associated with N time-slots of concatenated channels, wherein said concatenated channels include contiguously and virtually concatenated channels; extracting a multi-frame indicator for each of the N time-slots; converting the time-slot interleaved payload segments to per time-slot payload segments; storing each per time-slot payload segment in a memory location pointed to by a write pointer, said write pointer being defined by a multi-frame indicator and a sequence number associated with each time-slot; retrieving each per time-slot payload segment from its stored memory location and in accordance with a read pointer; outputting the per time-slot payload segments in accordance with the extracted multi-frame indicators to supply per-channel data; storing an expected sequence number associated with each time-slot in a first RAM; and storing a virtual channel number associated with each of the virtually concatenated channels in a second RAM; wherein each of the first and second RAMs are doubled buffered to enable hitless provisioning; wherein the contiguously concatenated channels are adapted to carry STS-Mc traffic to form STS-Mc-Nv traffic, wherein M is a multiple integer of three and greater than zero, and wherein N is an integer greater than zero.