Flat Soft-Synchronization for Gigabit Ethernet

This paper presents a synchronization platform for synchronizing nodes in a gigabit Ethernet network. There are two key concepts in this paper. The first is the implementation of a hardware-assisted timestamping technique that timestamps on-the-fly the inbound/outbound frames. With this technique and using a low-cost communication protocol, it is achieved an accuracy of hundreds of nanoseconds in a point-to-point scheme. The second concept will use the logical tree created by the spanning tree protocol (STP) to spread the synchronization along the multihop network in a link-by-link basis. This novel concept eliminates the hierarchical structure of most of the synchronization protocols to create a flat synchronization scheme.