Information About PTP
PTP is a time synchronization protocol for nodes distributed across a network. Its hardware timestamp feature provides greater accuracy than other time synchronization protocols such as the Network Time Protocol (NTP).
A PTP system can consist of a combination of PTP and non-PTP devices. PTP devices include ordinary clocks, boundary clocks, and transparent clocks. Non-PTP devices include ordinary network switches, routers, and other infrastructure devices.
PTP is a distributed protocol that specifies how real-time PTP clocks in the system synchronize with each other. These clocks are organized into a master-slave synchronization hierarchy with the grandmaster clock, which is the clock at the top of the hierarchy, determining the reference time for the entire system. Synchronization is achieved by exchanging PTP timing messages, with the members using the timing information to adjust their clocks to the time of their master in the hierarchy. PTP operates within a logical scope called a PTP domain.
Starting from Cisco NXOS Release 6.0(2)A8(3), PTP supports configuring multiple PTP clocking domains, PTP grandmaster capability, PTP cost on interfaces for slave and passive election, and clock identity.
All the switches in a multi-domain environment, belong to one domain. The switches that are the part of boundary clock, must have multi-domain feature enabled on them. Each domain has user configurable parameters such as domain priority, clock class threshold and clock accuracy threshold. The clocks in each domain remain synchronized with the master clock in that domain. If the GPS in a domain fails, the master clock in the domain synchronizes time and data sets associated with the announce messages from the master clock in the domain where the GPS is active. If the master clock from the highest priority domain does not meet the clock quality attributes, a clock in the subsequent domain that match the criteria is selected. The Best Master Clock Algorithm (BMCA) is used to select the master clock if none of the domains has the desired clock quality attributes. If all the domains have equal priority and the threshold values less than master clock attributes or if the threshold values are greater than the master clock attributes, BMCA is used to select the master clock.
Grandmaster capability feature controls the switch’s ability of propagating its clock to other devices that it is connected to. When the switch receives announce messages on an interface, it checks the clock class threshold and clock accuracy threshold values. If the values of these parameters are within the predefined limits, then the switch acts as per PTP standards specified in IEEE 1588v2. If the switch does not receive announce messages from external sources or if the parameters of the announce messages received are not within the predefined limits, the port state will be changed to listening mode. On a switch with no slave ports, the state of all the PTP enabled ports is rendered as listening and on a switch with one slave port, the BMCA is used to determine states on all PTP enabled ports. Convergence time prevents timing loops at the PTP level when grandmaster capability is disabled on a switch. If the slave port is not selected on the switch, all the ports on the switch will be in listening state for a minimum interval specified in the convergence time. The convergence time range is from 3 to 2600 seconds and the default value is 30 seconds.
The interface cost applies to each PTP enabled port if the switch has more than one path to grandmaster clock. The port with the least cost value is elected as slave and the rest of the ports will remain as passive ports.
The clock identity is a unique 8-octet array presented in the form of a character array based on the switch MAC address. The clock identity is determined from MAC according to the IEEE1588v2-2008 specifications. The clock ID is a combination of bytes in a VLAN MAC address as defined in IEEE1588v2.
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