METHOD AND SYSTEM FOR EFFICIENT FLOW CONTROL FOR CLIENT DATAFRAMES OVER GFP ACROSS A SONET/SDH TRANSPORT PATH

摘要

A method and system for flow control of GFP-encapsulated client data frames over SONET/SDH transport networks is described. Transport interfaces, in the form of port cards, have FIFO buffers for receiving the GFP frames. In acknowledgment of the received frames, a transmitting transport interface receives an acknowledgement in form of a returned frame sequence number tag along with the available capacity in bytes of the buffer of the receiving transport interface. With a continuous update of buffer capacity and trackin g the number of bytes in transit to the receiving transport interface, the transmitting transport interface maximizes the utilization of the channel through the SONET/SDH transport network, even with dropped frames or dropped acknowledgment tags.