indicated by the path trace i e either j1 or j2 bit 5 is used by a long path control upon activation of a switch request traffic can be switched in two directions around the ring i e east and west there are two potential routes by which the worker traffic can be re connected namely a short path and a long path it is assumed that the shortest route will be in the same direction of transmission as the worker paths traffic and will therefore constitute the preferred protection route in order to keep as much of the protection ring free of traffic as possible there is provided a means of telling the remote end to disable the bridging of traffic along the long path if traffic has been selected from the shorter route instead table 2 describes the assignment of this bit table 2______________________________________automatic protection switch aps byte bit 5 long path controlbit long path control______________________________________1 enable bridging of traffic to the long path0 disable bridging of traffic to the long path______________________________________ in the switch architecture bit 6 is used to indicate whether protection is 1 1 or 1 n and is assigned as indicated by table 3 if the received switch architecture bit indicates 1 1 then a protection architecture mismatch alarm is raised table.