ENHANCED DATA COMMUNICATIONS IN AN OPTICAL TRANSPORT NETWORK

Techniques are described herein for enabling mapping of virtual lanes for data streams for transmission over an optical transport network (OTN). Line encoded data blocks of a first data stream are distributed at an endpoint device in an OTN. The line encoded data blocks of the first data stream are distributed across a plurality of second data streams such that the second data streams can be processed at a lower data rate than a data rate associated with the first data stream. A transcoding operation is performed on the data packets of each of the second data streams to generate transcoded data packets. The transcoded data packets are processed such that the transcoded data packets of each of the second data streams can be sent over the OTN at the lower data rate.