= Introduction to Time Service
Eric S. Raymond <esr@thyrsus.com>
v1.6, Jan 2021
:author: Eric S. Raymond
:date: 13 January 2021
:description: A primer on precision time sources and services.
:email: <esr@thyrsus.com>
:keywords: time, UTC, atomic clock, GPS, NTP
:robots: index,follow
:sectlinks:
:toc: macro

include::inc-menu.adoc[]

This document is mastered in asciidoc format.  If you are reading it in HTML,
you can find the original at the GPSD project website.

== Introduction

This is a background paper on technological means for high-precision
time measurement. We discuss time source types, relative accuracy,
relative cost, and how those figures of merit have changed in recent
decades. A brief introduction to NTP (Network Time Protocol) is
included.

== Use cases for precision time service

More applications than are commonly realized require precise time;
which, in practice, means time accurate to a tenth of a second or
less.  While sub-millisecond time requirements are rare outside of
scientific work and the sharper end of industrial process control,
the range between 0.1sec and 0.001sec has a lot of customers.

As one large example, the Payment Card Industry (PCI) standards used
by the credit card industry mandate "correct and consistent time" and
gives NTP as an example of qualifying synchronization technology
<<PCI3>>.

The Financial Industry Regulatory Authority (FINRA) currently requires
that clocks used for business must be synchronized to within one second
of NIST time.  The synchronization must occur at least once a day and
before the start of business.  A pending rule change <<FINRA_14-47>>
proposes to tighten that to just 50 ms.

Modern cryptographic systems, such as Kerberos, require accurate time.
So do cellular networks and navigation systems for autonomous
vehicles.  As these cases suggest, the economic value of
high-precision time is likely to rise significantly in the future.

There are several equivalent ways to state the precision of a clock.
In the remainder of this introduction we will use "jitter" - the
width of its short-term random variation from its "correct" time -
(commonly Universal Coordinated Time or UTC); usually in nanoseconds
(ns), microsconds (&mu;s), or milliseconds (ms).  In these units the
range of interest for most precision time applications is from 100 ms
down to 1000 ns.

== Time service types

A "primary time source" is a very high-precision, very stable
oscillator (popularly called an "atomic clock") used as a source
standard by a national time authority.  By international agreement,
the U.S. and other major national time authorities use primary
standards based on electronic transitions between the two hyperfine
energy levels of the ground states of Cesium-133 atoms.

National time standards are synchronized (essentially, averaged after
removing outliers and consistent errors) to yield an international
reference called Universal Coordinated Time.  The US national time
standard, UTC(NIST), normally tracks UTC to within 5 ns <<BIPM-T>>.

In practice, the U.S. has another time standard; UTC(USNO),
military clock time propagated through the GPS system.  As the skew
between UTC(NIST) and UTC(USNO seldom if ever exceeds 10ns
<<TIMESCALE>> they are for practical purposes identical.

GPS enables receivers to generate a pulse-per-second
signal ("1PPS" or just "PPS") accurate to the top of the current
UTC second within 50 ns.

National time standards are also propagated through time radios. In
the U.S., digital time signal is provided by WWVB in Colorado, driven
directly by the NIST (National Institute of Standards and Technology)
master civil time standard.  Propagation delay to U.S. receivers
varies but is constant by location and no more than 20 ms; being
fixed, this can be easily compensated out. The jitter added to NIST
time by the WWVB transmission system is about 6 ns,
for a total jitter relative to UTC of about 26 ns at the
transmitter. Atmospheric conditions and signal-processing jitter in
the receiver may degrade this considerably, to the tune of 10-100ns
- however some of that is fixed delay that can be compensated out by
knowing your distance from the transmitter. Accuracy is better at night.

National time authorities may also offer a digital time reference via
landline phone; the U.S.'s has two, supported by NIST and the U.S.
Naval Observatory. NIST has a claimed accuracy of "a few milliseconds"
<<ACTS1>>; USNO says 4 ms <<ACTS2>>.

== Clock types

A clock, in this context, is a device for delivering an approximation
of a national time standard at a user's location.

High-end precision clocks are based on rubidium oscillators (close
relatives of the cesium time standards). Less expensive ones are based
on a temperature-compensated crystal oscillator or TCXO, sometimes also
seen as OCXO for "oven-compensated crystal oscillator"; these are more
closely related to the non-temperature-stabilized oscillator in a
quartz-crystal watch.

Due to frequency drift (induced mainly by temperature variations), all
such clocks need to be periodically conditioned by an external signal
from a time authority.  The cost of a clock correlates with its
"holdover" performance - how stable the oscillator's frequency is and
thus how little the time drifts between conditioning signals.

A "time radio" or "time receiver" is a clock that is conditioned by a
national time radio source.  High-end dedicated time receivers can
achieve 50 ns accuracy <<RADIO>>; consumer-grade "atomic clocks" (not
actually atomic at all but using a radio time signal) achieve a much
less impressive 30 ms <<HARCC>> or even as poor as 150 ms <<JUNGHANS>>.
Both are often constrained by siting problems and poor longwave
propagation, leading to frequent loss of signal.  In some parts of the
U.S., most notably the Boswash corridor and the southern tip of
Florida, coverage is so intermittent <<WWVBMAP>> as to make the WWVB
signal nearly unusable.  The technology works better for smaller,
European-sized countries.

Time receivers' model designations often include the call sign of
their radio source; for example, a 'WWVB' receiver uses the
U.S. national time radio, a 'DCF77' receiver uses the German national
time radio, an 'MSF' receiver uses the British national time radio,
and a 'JJY' receiver uses the Japanese national time radio. Some time
receivers (especially those made for the European market) can use
multiple stations. A useful table of national time radio stations is
at <<WIKISOURCE>>.

Devices described as "GPS clocks" (or more technically as "GPS
Disciplined Oscillators" or GPSDOs) are conditioned by the 1PPS output
of a GPS receiver.  Worst-case accuracy depends on the accuracy of the
1PPS and vendor data sheets commonly claim 100 ns, sometimes even 20 ns.

The GPS system standard <<IS-GPS-200G>> Section 3.3.4 specifies that
GPS satellite clock (MSC) from each satellite be within 90 ns of USNO
time to a certainty of one sigma. Adding in GPS satellite position
uncertainty widens the time uncertainty as broadcast from the GPS Sat
to 97 ns at one sigma.  Any GPS propagation and reception errors will
add to that uncertainly.  Thus one needs to assume a GPSDO will track
USNO time to better than to about 120-200 ns.

A plain GPS, without a stabilized crystal, can serve as a clock
source.  However, it will generally be unable to deliver time at all when
it lacks memory of a previous 3D position fix and current lock on at
least one satellite.  In other words, it has no "holdover".  (NTP
patches around this by using the system clock for holdover.)

GPSes actually deliver two times: 1PPS at top of second, and in-band
time expressed in a message packet over the serial or USB link.  In
consumer-grade GPSes, 1PPS may not be shipped to the serial connector;
if it is, it becomes a pulse on a handshake line, usually DCD.

In-band time is usually delivered accurate to the second only and is
shipped with significant and variable delay after 1PPS, typically on
the order of 100 ms. By contrast, 1PPS time output total error will
typically be close to 1&mu;s.

== Basics of NTP

NTP (Network Time Protocol) is a set of protocols that attempts to
synchronize computer clocks across the Internet - ultimately, Universal
Coordinated Time (UTC) as defined by several scale-related atomic clocks
run by national standards institutes.  NTP Version 4 is defined in
<<RFC-5905>>.

NTP service daemons running on each host do clock synchronization in
the presence of variable network latency by monitoring those delays in
real time and passing around messages that say, essentially, "I
received your request at time X, I'm sending the reply at time Y and
the propagation delay to my source of time is Z".  Each daemon then
uses rather complex algorithms that we won't attempt to describe here
to digest incoming messages into a composite "NTP time".

NTP conditions your system clock by noticing how your system clock time
differs from deduced NTP time, then speeding up or slowing down your
clock's tick rate until it is synchronized. These tick-rate changes
are usually extremely small, much too small for a human or even most
software timing loops to ever notice. But large changes are possible.

NTP's technique exploits the fact that while the quartz crystals used
in PC clocks are not very accurate, they are quite stable - that is,
their frequency drift in response to environmental changes is slow.

Most computers are just NTP clients.  They send NTP requests to a set
of servers and use the replies to adjust the local clock.  It is
generally expected that NTP clients will have an accuracy (that is,
maximum divergence from the master atomic clock) of of "a few tens of
milliseconds" <<RFC-5905>>; however, problems such as asymmetric
routing, bufferbloat, or large time jitter (especially likely on cable
networks) can degrade accuracy to around 100 ms and even worse in
extreme cases.

Some NTP hosts are time *servers*.  They respond to NTP clients with
time read from high-precision reference clocks (often abbreviated
"refclocks") synchronized to national time standards. The refclocks
are all the kinds of precision time source discussed earlier in this
document.

You will hear time service people speak of "Stratum 0" (the reference
clocks) "Stratum 1" (NTP servers directly connected to reference
clocks) and "Stratum 2" (servers that get time from Stratum
1). Stratum 3 servers redistribute time from Stratum 2, and so
forth. There are defined higher strata up to 15, but you will probably
never see a public time server higher than Stratum 3 or 4.

Jitter induced by variable WAN propagation delays
(including variations in switch latency and routing) makes it
impractical to try to improve the accuracy of NTP time to much better
than the "a few tens of milliseconds" of <<RFC-5905>>.

== Cost-effective clocks

There is about three orders of magnitude between the best achievable
wide-area-network accuracy and even the lowest-end GPS-constrained
clock or time radio.  Of all the time sources described here, the only
one not precise enough to drive WAN NTP is in-band time from a GPS
without 1PPS footnote:[Actually, a non-1PPS GPS with sufficiently
clever firmware can be good enough - but they almost never are in
practice, and never in consumer-grade hardware.].

Since the year 2000 GPSes have drastically decreased in price and
improved in performance.  For time-service purposes the important
performance metric is weak-signal performance and ability to operate
indoors.

A 1PPS-capable plain GPS that can operate reliably near a window is
for NTP purposes nearly as good as a time radio or GPS clock, and
orders of magnitude less expensive.  Even the USB 1.1 polling interval
of 1 ms does not introduce a disqualifying amount of jitter for WAN
service.

LANs are a different matter. Because their propagation delays are
lower and less variable, NTP can do about two orders of magnitude better
in this context, easily sustaining 1 ms accuracy.  The combination of
NTP and <<PTP>> can achieve LAN time service another two orders of
magnitude better.

GPS clocks and time radios remain, therefore, cost effective for
driving NTP over LAN.  This is significant in many scientific,
industrial, and government deployments.

While pressure from plain GPSes has eroded the competitiveness of both
GPS clocks and time radios, time radios have suffered more.  While
theoretically more accurate than GPS clocks, they have not improved in
weak-signal performance in the dramatic way GPSes and GPS clocks
have; they remain finicky and nearly as vulnerable to siting and
skyview problems as the GPSes of decades ago.

Furthermore, the U.S. radio-clock industry was impacted when <<WWVB>>
changed its modulation scheme at 2012-10-29T15:00:00Z.  This didn't
affect consumer-grade "atomic" clocks, which resynchronize once a day
and don't use the fine details of the signal, but it obsolesced all
the high-end equipment that conditioned on shorter time scales. At
least one major timing-systems vendor (Spectracom) bailed out of the
time-radio market entirely, and it is not clear there are any high-end
vendors at all left in the U.S.

== Summary

Some figures in this table are from <<GPSD-HOWTO>> and are explained
in more detail there.

.Summary of worst-case deviation from UTC
|==============================================================
|National primary time standard | 20 ns
|WWVB time radio broadcast      | 26 ns
|GPS 1PPS top of second         | 50 ns
|Dedicated time receiver        | 50 ns
|GPS-constrained clock          | 100 ns
|                               |
|1PPS delivered by OS kernel    | 1 &mu;s (1000 ns)
|Serial 1PPS                    | 5 &mu;s (5000 ns)
|1PPS over USB 1.1              | 1 ms (1000000 ns)
|1PPS over USB 2.0              | 100 &mu;s (100000 ns)
|                               |
|NIST/USNO modem time           | 4 ms (4000000 ns)
|Consumer-grade time radio      | 30-150 ms
|Normal accuracy of NTP         | ~ 30 ms (3000000 ns)
|Jitter of in-band GPS time     | > 100 ms (100000000 ns)
|==============================================================

== Further Reading

You can find a practical how-to on setting up a local Stratum 1 time
server using GPSD and an inexpensive GPS at <<GPSD-HOWTO>>.

== References

[bibliography]

- [[[PCI3]]] https://www.pcisecuritystandards.org/documents/PCI_DSS_v3-2-1.pdf[Requirements and Security Assessment
Procedures]

- [[[FINRA_14-47]]]
http://www.finra.org/sites/default/files/notice_doc_file_ref/Notice_Regulatory_14-47.pdf[14-47]

- [[[RFC-5905]]] http://www.ietf.org/rfc/rfc5905.txt[Network Time Protocol Version 4: Protocol and Algorithms Specification]

- [[[BIPM-T]]] ftp://ftp2.bipm.org/pub/tai/publication/cirt/[See latest Circular T from BIPM]

- [[[WWVBMAP]]] http://tf.nist.gov/stations/wwvbcoverage.htm[WWVB Coverage Area]

- [[[WIKISOURCE]]] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Radio_clock[Radio Clock]

- [[[IS-GPS-200G]]] https://www.gps.gov/technical/icwg/IS-GPS-200G.pdf[IS-GPS-200G]

- [[[TIMESCALE]]] https://www.nist.gov/pml/time-and-frequency-division/atomic-standards/nist-usno[NIST Time Scale Data Archive]

- [[[ACTS1]]] http://www.nist.gov/pml/div688/grp40/acts.cfm[NIST Automated Computer Time Service (ACTS)]

- [[[ACTS2]]] http://tycho.usno.navy.mil/modem_time.html[USNO Master
Clock via Modem]

- [[[RADIO]]] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Radio_clock[Radio clock]

- [[[HARCC]]] http://tf.nist.gov/general/pdf/2429.pdf[How Accurate is a Radio Controlled Clock?]

- [[[JUNGHANS]]] http://www.leapsecond.com/pages/Junghans/[Junghans Solar WWVB watch]

- [[[PTP]]] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Precision_Time_Protocol[PTP]

- [[[GPSD-HOWTO]]] link:gpsd-time-service-howto.html[GPSD Time Service HOWTO]

- [[[WWVB]]] http://www.nist.gov/pml/div688/grp40/wwvb.cfm[NIST Radio Station WWVB]

== History

v1.0, 2015-03-10::
      Initial version.

v1.1, 2015-03-11::
      Lots of tiny corrections from G+ and the blog.  Use the NTP
      accuracy estimate from RFC 5905.

v1.2, 2015-03-15::
      Clarifying language, proof-reading, and minor corrections.

v1.3, 2015-03-16::
      Text polishing, terminological cleanup.

v1.4, 2015-07-11::
      Text polishing, note upcoming change in FINRA, more about GPSDO precision.

v1.5, 2015-12-10::
      Fix typo in WWVB delay figure and date of modulation change.

v1.6, 2019-06-02::
      Fix linkrot, and link to https where possible.

v1.7, 2021-01-13::
      Add Table of Contents.  Cleanup markup.

== COPYING

This file is Copyright 2010 by the GPSD project +
SPDX-License-Identifier: BSD-2-clause
//end
