Open Compute and ePTS Time Transfer | Net Insight at ITSF 2025

Описание: Presented by Magnus Danielson and Per Lindgren, Net Insight at ITSF 2025 in Prague on October 29 2025.

Many of today’s commercial Radio Access Networks (RAN) rely on custom chips and specialized hardware features. However, the industry has been working for several years to virtualize and cloudify the RAN.

With the G Suppl.ePTS “Enhanced Partial Timing Support” work item, ITU-T has taken steps to provide a framework for enhancement to partial timing support, i.e., timing carried over an overlay time transport technology without timing support from the network nodes.

Protocol features proposed in ITU-T G Suppl.ePTS is designed to use standard Linux socket timestamping, which is available in all server software. It removes the dependencies of particular protocol support for timestamping in hardware also in the TimeReceivers and TimeTransmitters and allows for a greater flexibility in implementing optimized architectures for virtualization of the RAN. The protocol features will be presented and discussed.

Running the pre-standard protocol considered in ITU-T G Suppl.ePTS on very simple, low-cost, generic hardware like Raspberry PI have been presented in the Open Compute Project - Time Appliances Project (OCP-TAP). The synchronization results demonstrating timing accuracy far exceeding the needs for 5G RAN will be presented and analysed in this talk.