Timestamp issues
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Interpreting the "NTP Time function" program output

This program has two functions:

  • Clock Sequence Test: to look for any calls to GetSystemTimeAsFileTime where the time goes backwards.  This runs on the local PC, and so far no occurrences have been found.
  • Packet timestamps: to observe the timestamps in NTP packets returned from a remote NTP server to determine:
    • whether there are any packets where the server timestamped the packet it sent before the packet it received
    • what the offset of the TX and RX timestamps are compared to a reference source, so that one can judge whether any jitter seen on the difference of the packet timing is due to jitter on either the TX or the RX timestamp.

Download the program.
 

Clock Sequence Test

Pressing the Clock sequence button results in a large number of calls to the GetSystemTimeAsFileTime function, with the results being checked to make sure that time never goes backwards.  The results are in the charmingly mis-spelt Quick Check text as shown below.

 

Packet timing - Windows-7 ref.clock server with Interpolation

The is the result of using the Go button to start a test against an NTP server.  In this case, I have selected an NTP server running on Windows-7, with the interpolation enabled (which it is normally not on that OS), and with a GPS/PPS reference clock.  The text in the Quick check box shows the timestamps in one packet received from the remote server (as specified in the Test server box) and the time at which the program received the packet, and is mainly for interest.  The four graphs show:

  • Top-left: a histogram of the difference between the server TX and server RX timestamps.  You would expect this value to be a small positive number whose value depended on the time taken for the server to respond, so a faster PC might produce a lesser time difference.  In the plot below, there are no values less than about 20 microseconds, the majority of values are less than about 25 microseconds, but there are a few values as long as 300 microseconds, where something may have interrupted the NTP response and hence delayed timestamping the outgoing packet.  A log scale has been used to show these outliers.
  • Bottom left: the same data as the upper graph, but presented on a linear scale, showing the narrow range of response times for the great majority of packets.
  • Upper right: this is a histogram of the time the user program took to complete the send-packet - wait - receive packet sequence.  This is also shown on a log scale.  As expected, the great majority of sequences took very little time, with one or two outliers in the 15+ millisecond region, where the program was interrupted by other activity on the analysis PC.
  • Lower right: this shows the difference in time between the "Reference server" and the Test server RX and TX timestamps. The intention is that the the "Reference server" should be one with low jitter, and the analysis PC itself was used in this case, with the time derived from a simple NTP call.  In this case, you can see the 2500 test packets plotted horizontally, with the (RX - reference) time plotted in red, and the (TX - reference) time plotted in blue.  It's possible to conclude that:
    • the server TX times (blue) are later than the server RX times (red).
    • there may be more jitter in the TX times than the RX times.

 

Packet timing - Windows-7 server without Interpolation

This is the result of running the test against a LAN-synced Windows-7 PC, with the interpolation disabled as is normal and recommended for Vista and Windows-7.  Compared to the graphs above:

  • The offset of TX to RX packets is no longer always positive, but actually has a bipolar distribution.
  • This means that about half the TX timestamps are before the equivalent RX timestamp!
  • The linear scaled plot shows the distribution to be triangular (admittedly with some noise from only 2500 packets) with a total width of about 2 milliseconds.
  • A triangular distribution would result from the convolution of two rectangular distributions of about 1miilisecond width each.
  • From the lower-right graph, both the TX and RX packets appear to have a 1 millisecond random distribution, so that the noise contribution is not just from the TX or RX packet.

 

 

 

 
Copyright © David Taylor, Edinburgh   Last modified: 2015 Jan 18 at 09:32