Experimental Evaluation of the Jitter Generated in Timing Transfer (original) (raw)

Modeling the Effect of Nonideal Reference Clocks on the Jitter Generated in Timing Transfer

IEEE Transactions on Communications, 2000

In constant bit-rate timing transfer, the reference clocks which encode and reconstruct the service clock at origin and destination may be jittered. We present new, straightforward approaches to finding and visualizing jitter spectra in timing transfer for jittered destination and reference clocks, and confirm our results by simulation.

Synchronization performance of the Precision Time Protocol: Effect of clock frequency drift on the line delay computation

2008 IEEE International Workshop on Factory Communication Systems, 2008

This paper analyzes the factors that affect the synchronization performance in peer-to-peer precision time protocol (PTP). We first study the influence of frequency drift in the absence of jitter and compare the gravity of the master drift with that of the slave drift. Then, we study the influence of jitter under the assumption of constant frequencies and the effect of averaging. The analytic formulas provide a theoretical ground for understanding the simulation results, some of which are presented, as well as the guidelines for choosing both system and control parameters.

Precision synchronization of computer network clocks

ACM SIGCOMM Computer Communication Review, 1994

This paper builds on previous work involving the Network Time Protocol, which is used to synchronize computer clocks in the Internet. It describes a series of incremental improvements in system hardware and software which result in significantly better accuracy and stability, especially in primary time servers directly synchronized to radio or satellite time services. These improvements include novel interfacing techniques and operating system features. The goal in this effort is to improve the synchronization accuracy for fast computers and networks from the tens of milliseconds regime of the present technology to the submillisecond regime of the future.

Limits of synchronization accuracy using hardware support in IEEE 1588

2008 IEEE International Symposium on Precision Clock Synchronization for Measurement, Control and Communication, 2008

Clock synchronization protocols for packet-oriented networks, like IEEE 1588, depend on time stamps drawn from a local clock at distinct points in time. Due to the fact that software-generated time stamps suffer from jitter caused by nondeterministic execution times, many implementations for high precision clock synchronization rely on hardware support. This allows time readings for packets with very low jitter close to the physical layer. Nevertheless, approaches using hardware support have to carefully consider influences on synchronization accuracy when it comes to the range of nanoseconds. Among others, limits come from the update interval, oscillator stability, or hardware clock frequency. This paper enlightens the limits for such implementations based on an analysis of the influences of the main factors for jitter. The conclusions give hints for efficiently optimizing current implementations.

Active measurement and time-domain characterization of IP packet jitter

2009 IEEE Latin-American Conference on Communications, 2009

Synchronization over packet-switched networks has been attracting increasing attention lately, e.g. due to migration to IP transport in GSM networks. Timing is distributed by sending packet flows with constant rate. At the receiver, timing is recovered mostly based on PLL schemes that equalize packet random delay. The performance of these schemes depends significantly on the statistics of packet jitter, thus yielding a growing interest for real data measurement. We developed an experimental setup to measure IP packet jitter by active probing, aiming at statistical characterization of packet jitter in real heterogeneous networks. We present some experimental results, measured in networks including bridges and routers. Contrary to previous studies in literature, we emphasize data analysis by means of Modified Allan Variance (MAVAR) and Maximum Time Interval Error (MTIE), two well-known time-domain quantities widely used for synchronization interface specification in international standards. Although our setup is simple, the noise floor is negligible, compared to the network jitter under measurement.

Jitter analysis for two methods of synchronization for external timing injection

IEEE Transactions on Communications, 1996

The jitter generated by two different approaches to synchronization of an external timing source is analyzed. The two approaches are: the use of conventional stuffmg and the use of a simpler frame sampling synchronizer. It is shown that these two approaches have the same jitter power density spectrum. The result is obtained using a new time domain method developed in the paper. Exact expressions for the jitter on the synchronized external timing source are obtained. Furthermore, the effect of quantization in the conventional stuffing synchronizer on the jitter expressions obtained is also explored. Jitter generated by the frame sampling synchronizer is also analyzed using the time domain method, which again produces an exact expression. In the case where certain parameters of the two approaches are related, the location of spectral lines in their respective jitter spectra is shown to be identical. It is also shown that both approaches to synchronization introduce the so-called waiting-time jitter.

END-TO-END TIMING TRANSPARENCY IN PACKET NETWORKS: GNSS-BASED SYNCHRONIZATION OF THE END-SYSTEMS

In the past telecommunications were dominated by telephony. But now data communications are getting more and more important. Future networks, often called Next Generation Networks (NGN), will have to cope both with bursty computer data traffic and with realtime data streams such as telephony, video, and multimedia. Packet network technology is currently regarded as the most promising NGN approach. However, the real-time capability of today's packet network technology is still insufficient. This paper proposes a new solution for improving jitter performance of real-time communication services over packet networks in presence of high levels of packet delay variation. The idea is to synchronize both the transmitting and the receiving end systems to a stable common reference clock provided by a Global Navigation Satellite System (GNSS). GNSS-receivers installed in the access networks distribute the common time signal to the end systems. Simulations done for a scenario with G.729 coded voice communication over two medium-sized Ethernet LANs and a long-distance path in the global Internet show clearly, that a substantial reduction of the residual jitter at the receiving end can be achieved. In the case studied, standard deviation of the residual jitter was approximately 200 µs, compared to 3.0 ms with stateof-the-art packet network technology based on the Real-Time Protocol RTP.

Estimation and removal of clock skew from network delay measurements

4bwract-Packetdelay and 10SStraces are frequently used by network engineers, as well as network applications, to analyze network performance. The clocks on the end-systemsused to measure the delays, howeverj are not always synchronized, and this lack of synchronization reduces the accuracy of these measurements.

Synchronization Performance of the Precision Time Protocol

2007 IEEE International Symposium on Precision Clock Synchronization for Measurement, Control and Communication, 2007

This paper analyzes the factors that affect the synchronization performance in peer-to-peer precision time protocol (PTP). We first study the influence of frequency drift in the absence of jitter and compare the gravity of the master drift with that of the slave drift. Then, we study the influence of jitter under the assumption of constant frequencies and the effect of averaging. The analytic formulas provide a theoretical ground for understanding the simulation results, some of which are presented, as well as the guidelines for choosing both system and control parameters.

A new model-based clock-offset approximation over IP networks

Computer Communications, 2014

Having in mind multimedia systems applications, we propose a novel model-based approach to estimate the clock-offset between two nodes on the Internet. Different than current clock-offset schemes in the literature, which are iterative in nature, our scheme is aimed at getting a good non-iterative clock-offset estimation in real time (in the order of milliseconds). In our clock-offset estimation approach, the One-Way Delay (OWD) measurements are modeled with a shifted gamma distribution representing the current state of the probing link. By using the QQ-probability plot technique and linear regression model, we estimate the (shift parameter or) minimum value of the gamma distribution with probability zero. This estimated value represents the clock offset plus network propagation and transmission delay (queuing delay has already been eliminated) for the corresponding receiving path. End nodes exchange their corresponding minimum estimates and get an improved final clock offset estimate considering the network path asymmetries. Based on real experiments, we show that our scheme provides an extremely fast clock-offset estimation with lower RMSE and superior stability than NTP and current NTP-like state of the art methodologies in the literature Jeske and Sampath (2003), Choi and Yoo (2005), Adhikari et al. (2003), Tsuru et al. (2002). Moreover, our proposed scheme is non-intrusive (no kernel programming needed), easy to implement, and targeted as part of more complex real-time multimedia distribution protocols requiring a fast and reliable OWD estimates.