US Patent 9667370 Communication device with peer-to-peer assist to provide synchronization

A system and method for timing synchronization between network nodes. The timing synchronization can conform to the Precision Time Protocol (PTP) as defined in the IEEE 1588 protocol. The timing synchronization can include the insertion of ingress and/or egress timestamps into packets. For example, timestamps can be inserted into reserved fields of the header of a packet. The timing synchronization can also include the utilization of one or more reserved fields to initiate the generation of a timestamp upon the transmission of the packet and/or the retrieval of a previously stored timestamp.