RP 2059-15: Unify monitoring SMPTE ST 2059-2 PTP networks & devices

Are you planning to build, or have you built a ST 2110 system with PTP for time transfer across the network? If so, how do you plan to monitor the health of the networked timing core of your brand-new facility? The master clock distribution is now ‘in-band’. This means that each and every system element can impact the overall time transfer capabilities and accuracy in a way that was never present in conventional systems. While PTP does provide fault tolerance capabilities, as every point in the network can now influence the overall performance, performance degradation of time transfer is not always understood. With networks comes network-wide monitoring and as vendors have implemented diverse means to query and display timing related information, unfortunately this has also caused a “Tower of Babel” issue. System engineers may not be fully aware of best practices and can be surprised at the interactions between networked devices. SMPTE RP 2059-15 is tasked with creating a data model that provides a unified framework for reporting the relevant timing information. Having drawn upon existing industry efforts and reached out to other timing communities in parallel industries, it has defined a template for enabling coherent timing representation for all timing devices part of a SMPTE 2110 system. Equipment vendors and broadcast system engineers can learn how, if they adopt this Recommended Practice, they can benefit from the scale of network interoperability, and commonality of tools to help diagnose problems that may appear in one part of the network but are caused by a device in an apparently completely unrelated area.