2.3. Getting to Know the SONET and SDH Signals

North American standardization of SONET started in the mid 1980s with international standardization of SDH starting soon thereafter. The following are the essential features of SONET [ANSI95a] and SDH [ITU-T00a]:

  • A base TDM frame structure along with a similarly structured set of progressively larger frames (for faster signals).

  • A limited variety of “payload envelopes” (SONET) or “virtual con-tainers” (SDH) of fixed capacity (bandwidth) that are synchronously multiplexed into the base signal (or multiples of the base signal).

  • A flexible byte interleaving synchronous multiplexing method for placing the payload envelopes (or virtual containers) into the base signal such that short-term rate variations ...

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