Development and validation of network clock measurement techniques

Navy systems are inherently real time. As these systems evolve with the introduction of new requirements, technologies, and commercial off the shelf (COTS) equipment, they are evolving toward more distributed systems. A key component to the deployment of real time distributed systems in Navy applications is quality clock synchronization among the various computing platforms in the distributed system. The Network Time Protocol (NTP) is being viewed as a key technology for the provision of this synchronization. To facilitate analysis of NTP, a software mechanism for the measurement of clock offsets has been developed. This mechanism has been validated using independent validation tests. Finally, this mechanism can be used to study NTP and time synchronization subnet behavior.