Patent ID: 8902752

Claim:
A cell processing method in a switching network, comprising: segmenting a data packet in a data stream into one or more cells of a same length, or segmenting the data packet in the data stream into one or more cells of different lengths; inserting a Time Stamp and a Flow Identification into a cell header of each cell, and sending a marked cell header and a cell payload to a network card, wherein the Time Stamp is configured to mark local time when a source line card sends the cell, and the Flow Identification is configured to mark different data streams; and before the segmenting the data packet, updating local time according to time synchronization information carried in a received synchronization cell or data cell sent by the network card, so as to be synchronized to the network card with respect to time, wherein the synchronization cell or the time synchronization information comprises time information of the network card and delay information of a transmission path.