Disclosed are a method of and
system for enabling the transport of
timer protocols over a generic frame procedure (GFP) network. The method comprises the steps of transmitting a defined optical initialization sequence to a GFP mapper, and using that GFP mapper to detect the optical initialization sequence and to generate a specified GFP frame to represent the initialization sequence. This specified GFP frame is recognized as a control frame for
timer initialization. In a preferred embodiment, the
timer protocol uses biphase encoding to
encode clock data, and the method comprises the further steps of recovering
clock data from a
data stream that uses the biphase encoding, detecting a
clock rate in that
data stream, and using a look up table to map said detected
clock rate into a specific code for said control frame.