A synchronization service framework for XTP

New real-time applications like videoconference and video-on-demand as well as classical industrial and military hard real-time applications require a set of accurate services from transport protocols. Management of a global time reference in the network is one of them. Possibly, XTP will be one of the standard communication protocols for distributed real-time systems in a few years, due to its great variety of services and high performance offered. The authors propose the incorporation of a new service to the XTP offered set: the supply of a common time reference to a group of XTP users within the network. The proposed synchronization protocol to maintain this common time service works by wave sequence making use of the multicasting functionality of XTP 4.0. This proposed synchronization service maybe added to future XTP versions