Dave,
   A while back in an email thread you pointed out that our ID 
(draft-marlow-tictoc-computer-clock-accuracy-00.txt) only addressed interleaved 
broadcast and did not include interleaved symmetric mode and that a lot of the 
detail information is in your book.  We bought the book and have learned a lot 
particularly in section 16.6 where you have measurement data for interleave 
mode operation.  Your Backroom LAN example is similar to the experiments we 
ran.  We had some questions:

1) In your Backroom LAN example the GPS clock server ran in client/server mode 
with clients Macabre and Mort.  Would you expect better accuracy if 
client/server mode is used (as you did) versus if interleave broadcast mode 
were used between this server and these two clients?  

2)Similar in your Campus LAN example you used client/server mode in some of the 
operations versus using interleave broadcast, where is client/server mode 
better than interleave broadcast to use?

3) In your Backroom LAN example, Macabre and Mort ran interleaved symmetric 
mode between each other.  Would not the dominant synchronization factor come 
from the GPS clock server, given its lower stratum number?  Is the interleaved 
symmetric mode exchanges providing a secondary effect to keep these two 
together?

  Dave 


-----Original Message-----
From: [email protected] [mailto:[email protected]] On Behalf Of 
Karen O'Donoghue
Sent: Wednesday, June 08, 2011 23:10
To: NTP Working Group; [email protected]
Subject: [TICTOC] Fwd: Re: [ntpwg] Fwd: reminder for remote participation in 
today's tictoc meeting

Folks,

This came to me personally, and I neglected to send it on to the ntp and tictoc 
wg lists. My apologies for the delay. The question before us is whether or not 
the interleave capability should be properly documented and where the resources 
will come from to complete the effort. 

Karen

-------- Original Message -------- 
Subject:        Re: [ntpwg] Fwd: [TICTOC] reminder for remote participation in 
today's tictoc meeting    
Date:   Tue, 12 Apr 2011 18:18:43 +0000  
From:   David L. Mills <[email protected]> <mailto:[email protected]>          
To:     [email protected]        


Karen,

The following is in response to the ID you distributed. I offer it as a 
candidate for distribution to th eWG members.

Dave

This internet draft describes experiments using the interleaved broadcast mode 
recently incorporated in the NTP reference implementation. The experiments do 
not include the interleaved symmetric mode, which provides similar 
functionality in peer-to-peer configurations. For reference, these modes, their 
relevance to PTP and related information are discussed in detail in Chapters 15 
through 17 of the book "Network Time Synchronization - the Network Time 
Protocol on Earth and in Space, Second Edition, CRC Press 2011, as cited on my 
web page www.eedis.udel.edu/~mills <http://www.eedis.udel.edu/%7Emills> . 
However, most of the information relevant to the followings discussion can be 
found in the white papers at www.eecis.udel.edu/~mills/ntp.html 
<http://www.eecis.udel.edu/%7Emills/ntp.html> . Of particular interest are the 
documents "Analysis and Simulation of the NTP On-Wire Protocol" and "Security 
Analysis of the NTP Protocol." Both of these documents represent an update 
since t
 he book was published late last year.

Readers may wonder why these documents have not been published as an update to 
the protocol specification RFC-5905, which would have been the expectation 
several years ago in the adolescent Internet. However, the effort necessary to 
publish an ID with figures, tables and equations is nowadays simply 
unacceptable. My experience with RFC-5905 and RFC-5906 over the last five years 
of publishing effort is not sustainable. Thus, unless some collaboration, 
perhaps the TICTOC working group, chose to publish them as IDs, I will not 
commit that adventure myself.

First some nomenclature that may help in the following discussion. Timestamps 
captured for the clock discipline are classed as hardstamps, drivestamps and 
softstamps. Softstamps are captured during the course of user-space processing; 
they may be corrupted by operating system and device latencies, as well as 
transmission delays. Drivestamps are captured during the packet interrupt 
routines, so are much less affected by operating system scheduling and 
competition with other programs. Hardstamps are captured by dedicated hardware 
means, typically in the PHY layer of the network interface card (NIC). While 
the details vary, the typical intercept point is the media independent 
interface (MII), which monitors the frame level interface on a character by 
character basis. The capture means is usuallt a field-programmable gate array 
(FPGA) that parses the packeet, inserts timestamp data and recomputes the UDP 
checksum.

The interleaved capability was originally not intended for NTP, but for the 
Proximity-1 protocol specified by the Consultive Committee on Space Data 
systems (CCSDS). The Proximity-1 protocol is designed for communication between 
spacecraft in the vicinity of Mars and for future missions in the vicinity of 
the Moon. Space data links are often operated at very low data rates compared 
to typical Ethernet links. Typical rates range from 1 kb/s to 256 kb/s with 
very different data rates in each direction. Due to various queuing and 
transmission operations, the output delay can reach 30 s, so it is imparities 
that timestamps be captured close to the PHY layer. In the Proximity-1 desing, 
hardstamps are captured upon the passage of the ASM code combination at the 
beginning of each transmitted frame..

Queuing and transmission delays are not the only contributors to space data 
link delay. Reed-Solomon and convolutional encoding delays can be a large 
contribution to the link delay; however, these delays are a constant 
contribution to the lightwave transmission delay. These contributions - up to 
many seconds - can dwarf the lightwave transmission delays.

In the NTP interleaved design, drivestamps are captured in the device interrupt 
routine - on input immediately after the frame has been received and before 
copying to an input buffer; on output shortly after the frame has been 
transmitted and before the buffer is released for the following input or output 
frame. This can become rather awkward in the case of NICs of the PCNET 
architecture, as data are copied directly from user space to device buffers 
directed by DMA descriptors. Drivestamps have been used on input for many 
years, but for output this is possible only using the interleaved modes. The 
result avoids the latencies due to the message digest computation, Autokey 
protocol data units, output queuing and frame transmissions, typically some 
10-40 microseconds.

It should be obvious from the documents that a primary motivation for the NTP 
interleaved design was protection from network errors and intruder attack. The 
detailed analysis and simulation are designed to demonstrate resistance to 
common corruptions such as dropped or duplicate packets and possible bogus 
attacks. The NTP design includes a four-level security model, the lower two 
levels might be considered for a PTP application. This is one of the most 
important difference between the PTP and NTP protocol designs; however, the NTP 
design might be considered overkill in a sheltered, isolated Ethernet network.

Careful observers may notice an interesting anomaly with the interleaved 
broadcast mode. The preliminary volley intended to measure the roundtrip time 
uses basic mode, not interleaved mode. The reason for this requires some 
explanation. In times of old, the dominant concern was the 6-bone, an 
international consortium of multicast application developers. In that context 
with historic multicast configurations, including DVMRP and PIM, the multicast 
spanning tree was far different than the unicast spanning tree. Therefore, the 
preliminary volley was important to estimate the offset of the multicast server 
to the multicast client and thus the apparent one-way delay. In principle, with 
adroit protocolmanship, it would be possible to change the protocol to measure 
the interleaved roundtrip delay, which would be more appropriate for modern 
high-speed Ethernet networks.

Karen O'Donoghue wrote:




        -------- Original Message -------- 
Subject:        [TICTOC] reminder for remote participation in today's tictoc 
meeting     
Date:   Thu, 31 Mar 2011 09:56:35 +0200  
From:   Karen O'Donoghue <[email protected]> <mailto:[email protected]>       
 
Reply-To:       [email protected]       
Organization:   ISOC     
To:     [email protected], NTP Working Group <[email protected]> 
<mailto:[email protected]>    


        Folks,
        
        This is a reminder that the tictoc working group will meet today from 
        17:40 - 19:40 CEST (15:40 - 17:40 UTC). The tools agenda for the IETF 
        meeting (http://tools.ietf.org/agenda/80/) has links for the drafts, 
        presentations, jabber chat room, and audio streaming to facilitate 
        remote participation.
        
        Regards,
        Karen
        
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