Patent ID: 8625467

Claim:
An apparatus comprising: an upstream node in a packet based network that multicasts a plurality of packets; an intermediary node coupled to the upstream node; and a plurality of downstream nodes coupled to the intermediary node, wherein the upstream node, the intermediary node, and the downstream nodes are arranged in a tree topology, and wherein the intermediary node is configured to: receive a plurality of downstream data rates advertised by the downstream nodes; receive the packets from the upstream node at an upstream data rate equal to a maximum data rate of the downstream data rates; and multicast the packets from the intermediary node to the downstream nodes at the downstream data rates, and wherein the upstream node is coupled to a master clock associated with the maximum data rate and the downstream nodes are coupled to a plurality of corresponding slave clocks associated with the downstream data rates of the leaf nodes, wherein the packets comprise timestamps or frequency and time synchronization information for the master clock and the slave clocks, and wherein some of the packets are dropped when at least one of the downstream data rates is less than the upstream data rate.