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Re: [RE] Proposal from Jose Morales



Title: RE: [RE] Proposal from Jose Morales

Jose,

1. Can you describe your definition of synchronization.  Are you referring to time synchronization, frequency synchronization and/or phase synchronization, or something other form of synchronization?

2. Can you provide numbers that explain your following statement: "High quality synchronization services that provides all stations with a low jitter house clock"

3. Can you also share the applications/services for RE and their performance levels (in terms of required accuracy/stability, ppm/ppb, etc.) and the network impairments you think that could affect the performance levels.

4. Can you describe the use of the timestamp, how it is generated, transported and applied.

Thanks
- Michel


-----Original Message-----
From: owner-stds-802-3-re@IEEE.ORG [mailto:owner-stds-802-3-re@IEEE.ORG] On Behalf Of Jose Morales
Sent: Friday, November 12, 2004 5:38 AM
To: STDS-802-3-RE@listserv.ieee.org
Subject: [RE] Proposal from Jose Morales


All,

Dear friends, I would like to propose the following solution:

In order to obtain an isochronous network, we can use the following strategies:
    - Synchronize at physical/802.3 level.
       This implies to modify all the network elements (switches), and to use
       new equipment in all the network.
    - Synchronize at MAC/802.3 level.  It can be origin of incompatibilities.
    - Synchronize in LLC/802.3 level .
       The perfect place to do this, because it is is transparent to all 802.3 network,
       and will work also over 802.11, 802.15, 802.16, etc.

For the synchronization of the network, could be used a  technique equivalent to the one employed in 802.5, where all the stations have capacity to do the synch master, but only the active monitor does it, and all the others synchronize with him. Also I suppose that you know the mechanism which guarantees that there is always only one master synch, that would be the station with the lower value in the MAC address.

The system that I propose is very simple: The  synch master station sends periodically (for example each 20 or 100 milliseconds) a broadcast or multicast 802.3 frame, containing one 802.2 that transports the time stamp (the value of the real time clock). All the isochronous stations can synchronize their clock, compensating the very small jitter that it would take place in the transmission of the consecutive frames.

The frame will look like this:
(The SAP=27 and 28, as far as I know, are not used in any other application)

|DA=Broad/Multicast | SA | LENGTH |
|DSAP=27|SSAP=27|UI(03)| TIMESTAMP|
|PAD|FCS|

Once synchronized all the stations, the isochronous traffic could be sent in multicast with LLC type 1 protocol or in unicast with LLC type 2 protocol, including in each frame the time stamp.

LLC2 protocol has many advantages, like the error and flow control (end-to-end), the identification of streams by means of  P/F bit and that it would make possible the congestion management. Remember that TCP protocol also have the timestamp option, with 4 octes. It will be very useful to define the same size here.

The frame LLC2 will look like this:

|DA| SA | LENGTH |
|DSAP=28|SSAP=28| INFO|N(R)|P/F|N(S)|TIMESTAMP (4 octets)|DATA|FCS|


With the system I propose, we have "High quality synchronization services that provides all stations with a low jitter house clock". Now it is only necessary a 802.3 switch that guarantees that "isochronous services can use up to 75% of the link bandwidth, while the remaining is always available to best-effort traffic" and "assign resources for isochronous services".

This system is exactly the one that I propose in the manuscript  "Universal Ethernet Telecommunications Service: The Convergence of Internet, Broadband and Telephone networks on the IEEE 802 standards". I have sent it to the IEEE Communications Magazine and now is "Under Review", reason why I cannot pass it to the reflector.

Comments?

Jose Morales Barroso, Ph.D.
jmb@ieee.org