Patent ID: 7430196

Claim:
An apparatus for determining a time of transmission of received frames, comprising one or more processors having respective inputs to receive a sequence of transmission frames, conforming to a transmission protocol, the sequence representing payload data, the payload data comprising time data representing the time of transmission of said frames from a particular transmitter, the payload time data being distributed within the transmission frames in a predefined manner according to the transmission protocol, one or more memories configured to store and to provide to the one or more processors the transmission protocol, to allow the one or more processors to compile the payload time data distributed within the received transmission frames; a code provider configured to provide to the one or more processors one or more predetermined codes, said one or more codes used to represent the transmission time of respective frames, a reference portion of said code corresponding with a particular known reference transmission time of a frame comprising said code portion, and an offset portion of the one or more codes representing an offset transmission time of said offset portion with respect to the known reference transmission time of said reference portion; and wherein the one or more processors are configured to use the memory to compile at least a portion of one or more distributed payload time data from a group of the transmission frames received at the input, and to compare the one or more compiled portions of received payload time data with the one or more predetermined codes received from the code provider to determine the time of transmission of the received frames.