Our paper "EtherTime: Cross-vendor Evaluation of PTP/NTP on Ethernet-based COTS Embedded Platforms" has been selected by the Award Committee as an outstanding paper at RTCSA25. The award ceremony is scheduled for August 21st at NTU One-North, Singapore.
Authors: Vincent Bode, William Shen, Arpan Gujarati
Link to Conference: https://rtcsa2025.github.io/index.html
Abstract: We design and develop EtherTime, a tool for empirical evaluation of open-source implementations of the widely adopted Precision Time Protocol and Network Time Protocol standards. EtherTime is designed for distributed embedded systems networked over Ethernet. To demonstrate its benefits, we assemble a testbed of Raspberry Pi 4/5, Xilinx ZUBoard 1CG, and NVIDIA Jetson TK-1 boards, and carry out a measurement-based evaluation of four popular open-source implementations – PTPd, LinuxPTP, SPTP, and Chrony. EtherTime is successful in highlighting their limitations with regards to resource contention (specifically network and memory) and faults of various kinds (with/without hardware clock support). We open-source EtherTime and all datasets derived from this empirical study.