The NTP algorithms, a talk by Martin Walls delivered on 1st December 2021 at Churchill College, Cambridge.
Abstract: Basically every computer on the planet needs to be set to the correct time -- and nowadays we want this to happen automatically.
But how can we achieve synchronisation over an internet that is, by its very nature, asynchronous?
In this talk we'll look at the most common algorithm employed in practice, and how it chains together multiple stages of statistical filtering to give us a best estimate. We will discuss how we overcome the challenges of variable latency and jitter.
Finally, we'll explore some other algorithms we can use to get a higher accuracy.