Efficient Monitoring of ST2059-2 Based Time Transfer Performance

In any mission critical-broadcasting application, reliable synchronization is mandatory. For traditional black burst or trilevel-based synchronization, redundant sync signal generators are used, whose quality is monitored together with their respective switch-over units. To make the best use of a single shared communication medium within an all-IP studio, synchronization is accomplished using the IEEE 1588 Precision Time Protocol (PTP). Although multiple sync sources are deployed for redundancy purposes, the monitoring of their availability and precision is not sufficient to guarantee the defined level of accuracy. Additional data has to be gathered and analyzed by every node prior to deployment and as part of its ongoing operation. After briefly describing the main effects influencing PTP accuracy, several monitoring methods using both in-band and out-of-band are described, including how this benefits operations in the broadcast plant. Finally, we verify their respective merits through a series of measurements in a datacenter class multihop network architecture.