The complete guide to timing and synchronization in advanced service provider networks and enterprise applications

As networks have advanced, so has the need for precise timing and synchronization--including highly accurate phase synchronization. Without it, networks become increasingly vulnerable to outages, data loss events, and inefficiencies that can be notoriously difficult to diagnose. 5G telecom networks have especially stringent requirements, but they also apply to a growing number of enterprise applications in finance, factory automation, IoT, media, and beyond.

Synchronizing 5G Mobile Networks is the definitive, comprehensive guide to all aspects of timing and synchronization. Drawing on extensive experience developing and implementing timing and synchronization systems, three leading experts cover standards, protocols, clock design, architecture, solution design, deployment tradeoffs, day-to-day operations, troubleshooting, and more.

This book will be valuable to professionals with diverse backgrounds, even those with no timing or synchronization experience. It will be especially useful to engineers and consultants designing or implementing mobile networks; test engineers validating equipment or production solutions; students seeking careers with service providers or in advanced private networks; and technology leaders seeking to understand the growing role of time synchronization.

• Understand timing and synchronization concepts, goals, sources, and transport
• Explore timing applications in telecommunications and beyond
• Build synchronous networks with clocks, timing reference sources, time distribution, and timing signal consumption
• Review the role of standards development organizations in defining standards for timing and synchronization
• Drill down into the details of clocks, clock signals, and clock components
• Review traditional TDM-based techniques for frequency synchronization
• Explore precision time protocol (PTP) characteristics, features, profiles, and security
• Master best practices for designing and deploying timing in physical and packet-based networks
• Thoroughly understand timing metrics and end-to-end time error budgeting
• Establish accurate timing and synchronization in advanced 5G and LTE networks, including 5G New Radio and RAN environments
• Manage tradeoffs in synchronizing diverse cell sites, topologies, radio types, and mobile generations
• Verify, operate, monitor, and troubleshoot timing systems

Shahid Ajmeri is a senior product manager at Cisco with responsibility for leading its 5G transport and mobile edge architecture strategy. He has more than 20 years of experience in the service provider industry, focusing on various technologies ranging from 3G/4G to 5G mobile networks, mobile edge computing, telco data center, service provider security, time synchronization, and end-to-end network design. Shahid has been instrumental in driving network transformation projects and architecting next-generation networks for customers across the globe. He currently works across disciplines, bringing together engineering, standards development organizations, and customers to develop and translate product requirements from industry and standard-setting bodies to the market.

Anshul Tanwar is a principal engineer at Cisco Systems, where he is known as a technologist with a combination of R&D expertise and business sensibility. During his tenure of more than 20 years at Cisco, Anshul has architected many routing and switching products used by large tier 1 mobile and Metro Ethernet service providers across the world. He has led the SyncE and PTP architecture definition and implementation for multiple access and pre-aggregation routers in Cisco. In his most recent role, Anshul was responsible for defining the deployment architecture of phase timing synchronization for one of the world's largest service provider LTE/LTE-A networks. He is also a co-inventor on three patents, including one covering synchronization.