Knowledge Base

John Eidson's general overview of the technology, the standard, and applications, plus other topics. Hosted at NIST. This regards only PTP version 1. (Version 2 is from 2008.)

This is an informal glossary for educational purposes. It is reviewed by experts but is not intended to replace more formal definitions in standards. (Click the “Notes” link at the website for details.)

An exciting milestone on the road to TRILL deployment occurred from August 3rd to 5th 2010 at the University of New Hampshire InterOperability Laboratory (UNH-IOL), as a group of companies attended the first multi-vendor TRILL plugfest. The plugfest was successful in demonstrating interoperability between TRILL devices. It was a first step towards wide deployment of TRILL and valuable knowledge for increasing TRILL interoperability was gained through the event.

Broadband Forum is an international industry consortium of nearly 200 leading service providers, equipment manufacturers and other interested parties, focused on developing the full potential of broadband DSL to meet the needs of the mass market.

From back of book: "Fundamentals of DSL Technology... combines the strengths of the field's most renowned DSL experts, providing a foundation of all aspects of DSL system design."

From the back cover: "PPP Design, Implementation, and Debugging, Second Edition, is a complete and convenient resrouce for netowrk system designers and administrators. This book contains everything you need to know to work with the Point-to-Point Protocol (PPP), one of the most important Internet protocols in use today. Inside you'll find clear explanations of the underlying concepts, practical implementation information, and valuable debugging techniques to keep your PPP connections running smoothly, efficiently, and uninterrupted."

From the back cover: "Digital Subscriber Line technology heralds the age of digital communication, providing a faster, more efficient method of transmitting data over regular telephone lines. The widespread adoption of DSL technology increases the demand for subject-specific, in-depth knowledge of this breakthrough in digital communication. DSL: Simulation Techniques and Standards Development for Digital Subscriber Line Systems arms the communications and networking engineer with the quintessential information for implementing DSL systems . . . "

From the back cover: "I wrote this book for those of us in the world's most exciting industries - telecommunications, networking and the Internet. I deliberately didn't write a book that only geeks could understand. I wrote a business book that you and I could understand. I explain the technical concepts in non-technical , business language that anyone in business (whether buying, selling or investing) should be able to understand. Some of my definitions are short. Some are encyclopedic. My focus is 720 practical. What the term means. What the technology does. What benefits the technology confers. which pitfalls to watch for. Use this book in your day-to-day business life. Dip into it before a meeting with a vendor, a customer, a broker or a boss. I've got 19 years in this book. My readers and my contributing editor, Ray Horak, have contributed enormously over the years. By now, all of us have made this dictionary pretty darn good. I'm proud of this edition."

From back cover: "Digital Subscriber Lines (DSLs) have transformed millions of ordinary phone lines into broadband arteries that link homes and businesses to the Internet at megabit speeds. DSL Advances brings together the state-of-the-art in DSL technology and architecture for every technical professional and manager. The authors of the classic Understanding Digital Subscriber Line Technology review the key challenges service providers and equipment manufacturers face now, preview tomorrow's most important standards and technical enhancements, and offer new insights into today's regulatory and business environment."

From the back cover: "The basic infrastructure for the global broadband network of the future is already in place in most homes and offices. Ordinary telephone lines can provide low-cost, high volume access to the exploding world of telecommunications services that users increasingly rely on. Now, leading experts in the field hve come together to share their insights in a single volume, explaining the past, present, and future of all the DSL technologies."

From the back cover: "Signal processing and noise reduction are at the core of telecommunications and information processing systems. With the increasing use of digital cellular mobile systems in a variety of adverse environments, noise reduction is becoming a particularly important aspect of communication system design. This second edition provides a thoroughly revised and expanded introduction to the fundamentals of random processes, Bayesian modelling, and noise reduction. The subject is covered in a graphical and mathematically accessible manner with the emphasis on Bayesian inference and its application to noise reduction."

From the preface: "The third edition of Digital Communications has undergone a major reorganization. Compared with with the second edition, which had eight chapters, the third edition contains fifteen. Chapter 1 (Introduction) and Chapter 15 (Multiuser Communications) are new. Other new material that has been added includes a treatment of run-length-limited codes, Nakagami fading statistics, trellis codeing for fading channels, multicarrier modulation, and an expanded treatment of blind equalization. Since this is an introductory-level text, the treatment fo these topics is limited in scope. Some topics that were in the second edition have been deleted, including echo cancellation and suppression of narrowband interference in spread spectrum signals."

This presentation provides a high level overview and introduction to TRILL, and related technologies.

This tutorial provides an overview of ADSL technology and focuses on the physical layer as defined in ANSI T1.413-1998. From the introduction: "The demand for high-speed data networks in the "last mile" has driven the need for robust, interoperable, and easy to use multi-vendor Digital Subscriber Line (DSL) access solutions. DSL collectively refers to a group of technologies that utilize the unused bandwidth in the existing copper access network to deliver high-speed data services from the distribution center, or central office, to the end user. DSL technology is attractive because it requires little to no upgrading of the existing copper infrastructure that connects nearly all populated locations in the world. In addition, DSL is inherently secure due to its point-to-point nature."

An overview of ADSL systems that includes network architecture, protocol architecture, typical ADSL implementations, RFC1483 bridging, PPP over ATM over ADSL, and PPP over Ethernet over ADSL.

This presentation provides an overview the ITU-T G.994.1 (G.hs) Handshaking Procedures for Digital Subscriber Line Transceivers standard. The overview covers the physical layer modulation (DPSK), frame structures, message structures, and parameter encoding. The presentation also includes examples of the differential encoding used for the modulation, and the delimiting bits used within the parameter tree.

This presentation provides an overview and introduction to Voice over DSL (VoDSL) technologies. The presentation covers the basics of channels voice over DSL, Voice over ATM (VoATM) and Voice over IP (VoIP). The presentation also includes a quick introduction to BLES, which is used to transport voice of AAL2 over ATM.

This presentation provides a high level overview and introduction to IPsec, and related technologies.

This guide assists implementors of IPsec in preparation for testing at the IOL.

Overview of internetworking basics and technologies, provided by Cisco Systems.

Contains ten Wireshark color filters for the ten PTP message types

A spreadsheet to help one develop a sense of time scales

A live clock shows the difference between UTC and TAI, which changes from 34 seconds to 35 seconds during the leap second on 2012-Jun-30. PTP time is the same as TAI.

The Extended Sockets API (ES-API) is a specification published by the Open Group that defines extensions to the traditional socket API in order to provide asynchronous I/O and also memory registration for Remote Direct Memory Access (RDMA). These two major new features enable programmers to take advantage of today's multi-core processors and RDMA network hardware, such as InfiniBand, iWARP and RoCE interfaces, in a convenient yet efficient manner.

A brief tutorial describing the 1000BASE-X PCS and PMA sublayers that are defined in Clause 36 of the IEEE 802.3 Standard.