
435Emerging Systems and the Future of SDH
14.3.3.1 What Is GFP?
GFP is an “encapsulation mechanism” for transport of data signals on SDH.
“Encapsulation” is a process in data communication in which a particular
data packet (or even a frame) is added with a header of the “encapsulating
protocol” to form a new frame. The new frame thus contains a header and
the old frame. When this “encapsulated” frame is received by the sink, the
new header is processed rst. Figure 14.16 shows the concept.
Similarly, the frames pertaining to any of the user data protocol are encap-
sulated in the GFP frame, transmitted over SDH, received by SDH sink, and
the