IEEE 1588 clock synchronization over IEEE 802.3/10 GBit ethernet

Using IEEE 1588 for highly accurate clock synchronization between nodes of a distributed system has become a widely accepted approach. IEEE 802.3/Ethernet is frequently utilized as communication layer to exchange the Precision Time Protocol (PTP) messages specified in the IEEE 1588 standard. 10/100/1000 MBit Ethernet communication is commonly used by now. In contrast, fiber optics based 10 GBit Ethernet is only in the early stages of adoption. With an increasing usage of this technology, clock synchronization via 10 GBit communication is becoming an important issue. In this paper we present an FPGA based solution for IEEE 1588 clock synchronization via 10 GBit Ethernet. Apart from the implementation details the paper focuses on communication delay jitter measurements - since jitter highly affects synchronization quality - and presents a comparison between communication jitter and previous Ethernet speeds.