Network Time Protocol

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The Internet is a global system of interconnected networks that serve several billion of users worldwide. These millions of interconnected networks consist of public, private, government, academic and business networks which amount to around 903,909,315 hosts. Cisco also estimated that by 2015, there would be 3.47 devices connected per person resulting in around 25 billion devices connected to the Internet. The Internet is continuously growing primarily because people are relying on it more and more. For instance, many financial and legal transactions rely on the Internet like stocks and bonds trading. Air traffic also controls the Internet in order to access coordinated times to plan flight paths and this is only naming a few applications that need the Internet to carry out specific tasks. One thing these applications require is accurate, reliable time and in the case of financial and legal transactions they will need real-time access to databases that could be distributed over an internet of many networks. Time synchronisation may seem like a minor matter and it is for a person who is setting the time on their wristwatch within a minute or two with their TV time. Now, we’ll say this person set their computer clock time within a minute or two of their wristwatch and the computer clock got rate errors ten times the wristwatch. This would not matter if the only problem the person experienced due to clock errors was that the occasional email arrived before it was sent. However, if you applied the same kind of time synchronisation to a distributed airline reservation system it could result in a seat being sold twice or for a financial transaction like stocks where an online stock trade is completed before it is bid. This i...

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