1. Protocol Overview

In brief, SONNET is a method for compressing 810-byte (9 lines by 90 bytes) SONET OC-1 frames into approximately 400-byte (fourteen line decasyllabic) English sonnets. This compression scheme yields a roughly 50% average compression, and thus SONNET compression speeds are designated OCh-#, where 'h' indicates 50% (one half) compression and the # is the speed of the uncompressed link. The acronym is pronounced "owch."

Mapping of the 2**704 possible SONET payloads is achieved by matching each possible payload pattern with its equivalent Cerf catalog number (see [1], which lists a vast number of sonnets in English, many of which are truly terrible but suffice for the purposes of this memo).