PTP Client/Server Redundancy and Load Balancing in Datacenter Applications

This paper describes an approach to PTP Server redundancy and the load balancing of PTP Clients in large scale datacenter applications. When a PTP Server fails, the PTP Clients that were synchronized to it are redistributed among the remaining operational PTP Servers. The redistribution is done in a way that the number of PTP Clients is load balanced as uniformly as possible across all the operational PTP Servers. The approach is part of the Simplified PTP (SPTP) protocol and is implemented through modifications of the Best timeTransmitter Clock Algorithm (BTCA) the Unicast timeTransmitter Table (UMT). These modifications are required because with the current IEEE Std 1588-2019 protocol, it is not possible for PTP Clients to consider a PTP Server differently.