
420 Principles of Synchronous Digital Hierarchy
of the VCs carrying the concatenated payload can be carried by any of the
overhead bytes available to spare. The byte H4 of the POH is used for carry-
ing this information. The V-CAT of X VC-4s is shown in Figure 14.1.
The VC-4s carry their POH as usual and travel normally on the network.
At the receiving end, the information contained in the byte H4 facilitates the
original data stream to be reconstructed by taking out the data in proper
sequence from the concatenated VC-4s. The group of virtually concatenated
payloads is called a VCG or a “V-CAT group.”
Incidentally, the above procedure solves