Computer Network Time Synchronization using a Low Cost GPS Engine

Accurate and reliable time is necessary for financial and legal transactions, transportation, distribution systems, and many other applications. Time synchronization protocols such as NTP (the Network Time Protocol) have kept clocks of such applications synchronized to each other for many years. Nowadays there are many commercial GPS based NTP time server products at the market but they almost have a high price. In this paper we are going to use a low cost GPS engine to build a time server to provide time synchronization with accuracy of a few milliseconds. This time server is relatively very cheap and it can be used in almost all typical applications. We also proposed a software based NTP time server implemented in MATLAB as well.