White Rabbit addresses the development of a new generation of real-time, ultra-high precision switches designed following the most demanding (sub-nanosecond) synchronization requirements posed by current Big Science Facilities.

Over the last three years Integrasys and CERN were cooperating in a commune purpose creating the White Rabbit Switch. Switch which guarantees a unique time precision, 1ns accuracy and less than 20ps jitter.

It permits thousands of nodes in the same network, and 10 km range between nodes. WR can operate over Fiber and cooper.

White Rabbit Switch Project

The WHITE RABBIT technology extends the capabilities of Ethernet networks to provide extremely precise, sub-nanosecond synchronisation solutions to geographically dispersed equipment, solving the problems posed by synchronisation systems in highly complex particle accelerators (CERN, GSI).

Integrasys participates in the project developing the embedded switch routing software and remote management modules according to IEEE 802.1Q standard.

Features

Common clock for physical layer for the whole network, with extreme precision in both time and frequency (<1ns).

Deterministic Ethernet Network, with latency guarantee for the delivery of high priority traffic among stations connected to the network.

Operation Principles

Hierarchical Network: master WR switch directly connected to a precise time source (GPS). Each slave WR switch layer obtains synchronisation signal from the immediate upper layer.

WR PTP extended protocol permits obtaining sub-nanosecond synchronisation in the entire network, correcting the effects of latency and signal phase shift.

The WR routing functions enable labelling and sending high priority traffic in real time, applying deterministic algorithms.

WR switches integrate several redundancy and error correction mechanisms that guarantee their reliability in critical environments.