Monitoring and Analysis of SMPTE ST 2059-2 PTP Networks & Media Devices

As All-IP studios leveraging the SMPTE ST 2110 document suite gain traction, one of the fundamental pillars upon which such systems rely is an accurate and reliable time transfer protocol. SMPTE ST 2059 standardized such a model based on the IEEE 1588 Precision Time Protocol. — Every element, it being network or media devices, impacts the overall time transfer accuracy. This impacts the timing of the ST 2110 media streams that are generated or received by the media nodes. Whilst PTP does provide fault tolerance capabilities, performance degradation of time transfer is not always well understood. This can significantly impact operations in live networks, it being due to a sudden event or a degradation over time. Therefore, an overarching view of the end to end timing system including backup, standby and network devices is required. — Monitoring of such capabilities should be common to all devices, whenever possible, including different means to verify in-band and out-of-band measurements as to how devices are performing, with respect to time transfer. Combined with historical archiving of the monitored data, this provides the framework for tracking and correlating possible events. This paper describes the different monitoring capabilities, their advantages and weaknesses and the value they provide to the monitored datasets. It further focuses on the means to uniformize the process across all monitored devices to ensure consistency in the collected data. Finally, we discuss the ongoing efforts in SMPTE and other standardization bodies around PTP monitoring, the common trends, expected outcome and how these will contribute to streamlining time transfer monitoring, supervision and analysis.