EXFO IQS-8100 Series Transport Blazer for IQS-600 - Manual (Page 674)

Glossary
660 IQS-8100 Series Transport Blazer
Next-Gen - Virtual Concatenation (VCAT)
Next-Gen - Virtual Concatenation (VCAT)
SONET/SDH multiplexing combines low-speed digital signals (DS1, DS2,
DS3 for SONET; E1, E3, and E4 for SDH) with the required overhead to form
building-block frames called STS-1 SPE (SONET) and STM-1 (SDH). To
enable higher-bandwidth transport than these basic rates allow
individually, multiple SPEs can be combined and transported across the
SONET/SDH network as a single connection, with the first SONET container
payload pointer set to normal mode and the subsequent payload pointers
set to concatenation mode, thus linking all the units together.
The following table outlines supported contiguous concatenation for both
SONET and SDH. For the SONET standard, these are denoted as STS-Xc,
and for SDH as VC-4-Xc.
SONET SDH
Payload Capacity
(Mb/s)
STS-1 VC-3 48.38
STS-3c VC-4 149.76
STS-6c VC-4-2c 299.52
STS-9c VC-4-3c 449.28
STS-12c VC-4-4c 599.04
STS-24c VC-4-8c 1198.08
STS-48c VC-4-16c 2396.16
STS-192c VC-4-64c 9584.64