Patent ID: 7158488

Claim:
A communication system having a communication network and a plurality of nodes connected to the communication network and in which audio data are transferred between the plurality of nodes with respective sampling clocks of the plurality of nodes synchronized via a synchronization signal packet, said communication system comprising: a grouping section that groups said plurality of nodes into a plurality of groups; and a master setting section that sets, for each of the groups, one of the nodes within the group as a clock master node, wherein the clock master node in each of the groups sends a synchronization signal packet to the communication network after attaching, to the synchronization signal packet, identification information indicative of the group to which the master clock node belongs and an ID indicating itself as the clock master node of the group, and wherein each of said plurality of nodes that is not set as the clock master node receives, from among a plurality of the synchronization signal packets sent to the communication network, a synchronization signal packet having identification information indicative of the group to which the node belongs and the ID indicative of the clock master node of the group to which the node belongs and performs a synchronization process on the sampling clock thereof on the basis of the received synchronization signal packet.