The IEEE 1588TM-2019 Standard recently announced passage of a notable amendment, P1588b. This amendment specifies the PTP mapping for transport over the Optical Transport Network (OTN), which is a very common transport network technology. For mapping into the OTN’s Optical Transport Unit (OTU) and Flexible Optical Transport Network (FlexO), PTP messages are encapsulated into frames that follow the Generic Framing Procedure (GFP) and the PTP message timestamp points are defined relative to events that exist at the OTN framing layer. The OTN and PTP transport over the OTN were originally defined by the telecom industry. This amendment enables applications other than telecom to transport PTP messages over the OTN. The P1588b amendment is available here.
