Practical analysis of the Precision Time Protocol under different types of system load

Sammanfattning: The existence of distributed real-time systems calls for protocols for high accuracy time synchronization between devices. One such protocol, the Precision Time Protocol (PTP) reaches sub microsecond synchronization precision. PTP can be implemented both in hardware and software. This study aimed to analyze how system stress could affect the accuracy and precision of software implemented PTP between two devices. This was done using two Intel Galileo Generation 2 running Linux systems. Software was used to simulate CPU, I/O, network, and OS usage. Data was extracted from software logs and summarized in charts and then analyzed. The results showed that PTP synchronization accuracy and precision does suffer under certain types of system load, most notably under heavy I/O load. However the results might not be applicable to real-world scenario due to limitations in hardware and the synthetic stress tests do not correspond to real-world usage. Further research is required to analyze why and how different types of system load affects PTPs accuracy and precision.