Cisco® Secure Internet Security Solutions

Network Time Protocol (NTP)

The Network Time Protocol (NTP) allows for time synchronization of equipment on the network. As commonly used, one router is set as the master to which other devices look for the current time. If the current time is different than the time received from the master time device, the time is adjusted accordingly. The master device also looks at a known time source. This time source may be a local device, a radio device connected locally, or a publicly available device on the Internet. Cisco's implementation of NTP allows for the delay that the packet carrying the current time experiences while crossing the Internet. By having all the devices synchronized to one clock, understanding an outage on a network is easier. By ...