INTERNET TIME SYNCHRONIZATION - THE NETWORK TIME PROTOCOL

This paper describes the network time protocol (NTP), which is designed to distribute time information in a large, diverse internet system operating at speeds from mundane to lightwave. It uses a symmetric architecture in which a distributed subnet of time servers operating in a self-organizing, hierarchical configuration synchronizes local clocks within the subnet and to national time standards via wire, radio, or calibrated atomic clock. The servers can also redistribute time information within a network via local routing algorithms and time daemons. This paper also discusses the architecture, protocol and algorithms, which were developed over several years of implementation refinement and resulted in the designation of NTP as an Internet Standard protocol. The NTP synchronization system, which has been in regular operation in the Internet for the last several years, is decribed along with performance data which shows that timekeeping accuracy throughout most portions of the Internet can be ordinarily maintained to within a few milliseconds, even in cases of failure or disruption of clocks, time servers or networks.