[time-nuts] Low-long-term-drift clock for board level integration?

Bob Camp lists at rtty.us
Tue Feb 21 02:11:41 UTC 2012


Hi

Even on good networks, getting below 1 ms with NTP is problematic. Yes indeed I have a heard of servers that will go below one us on a local LAN. That all breaks down pretty fast ( like under a dozen hops ) once you are on the Internet. 10 to 100 us is only going to work on NTP with local nets and symmetric routing.

Bob



On Feb 20, 2012, at 8:44 PM, paul swed <paulswedb at gmail.com> wrote:

> Even if the path is mapped the ques in the switches can change. Say your
> packet is first and the next trip its the 50th. Just depends on the overall
> network loading.
> This has been tried many times and there is the ability to get a feel on
> the timing. But not like GPS.
> Regards
> Paul.
> WB8TSL
> 
> On Mon, Feb 20, 2012 at 8:40 PM, Chris Albertson
> <albertson.chris at gmail.com>wrote:
> 
>> On Mon, Feb 20, 2012 at 12:13 PM, Brooke Clarke <brooke at pacific.net>
>> wrote:
>> 
>>> You may be able to do a similar thing in your receivers.  For example if
>> the
>>> master node were to send a timing message at known times (say once at the
>>> top of  every hour) the receivers could use that to determine their local
>>> clock offset and rate for those cases where the path was the same (or
>> maybe
>>> even for a list of paths).  The offset and rate numbers can be used to
>>> correct the measured time to actual time without changing the clock's
>> rate
>>> using simple math.  You can trade the receiver clock stability for the
>> time
>>> between the timing messages.
>> 
>> 
>> So you are suggesting a very simplified version of NTP.  I doubt you'd
>> do better than using real-NTP.
>> It turns out the method works at the millisecond level but not at the
>> uSec level unless "everyone" is on the same local Ethernet
>> 
>> There is one way to improve timing but it only works if you have
>> control of all the network equipment.   This means it can't work on
>> the Internet but it can work on some large networks.  Use "PTP".
>> This is a little like NTP in that it uses a network for time
>> distribution but has a slightly different method.   Unlike NTP, for
>> PTP you need special routers and switches built to support PTP but
>> then PTP can support uSecond level timing over a wide area and NTP
>> mostly can't
>> http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Precision_Time_Protocol
>> 
>> Chris Albertson
>> Redondo Beach, California
>> 
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