Reliable Timestamping in Windows

EasyChair Preprint no. 2335, version 2

Abstract

The Northrop Grumman Corporation - Mobility Air Force (MAF) Distributed Mission Operations (DMO) team located Orlando, FL participates in Air Refueling Events by interacting and testing other simulators across the country using our interactive test tool. The test tool along with other products and services we provide are built and developed using Windows machines. The MAFDMO team currently has to support Red Hat Linux environments for the test tool mentioned above because of Windows’ inability to naturally adhere to the MAF DMO Time Synchronization standards. There is currently a great financial interest in being able to use the test tool on Windows instead of Linux. The current yearly Red Hat Linux license cost $25,076.96 with thousands more added when the labor and maintenance cost of supporting multiple production environments is added in. If we were able to get rid of the Linux license fees we would ease the burden of our Development, Test, IT and Infrastructure teams.

This paper discusses how we plan to transition our application from Linux to Windows allowing us to create the Windows only production environment we desire. This paper provides solutions to the following problems that occur when using Windows instead of Linux. The first problem is getting Windows to sync to a GPS time source within 100 microseconds as described in our MAF DMO Time Synchronization Standards. The next problem is getting Windows to grab the system time, put it in a PDU and send it quick enough so that the system time we grabbed is still within the 100 microsecond time range when sent. Finally, this paper discusses how we plan to implement the solutions found to achieve the Windows only production environment throughout our office.

Keyphrases: Air refueling, air refueling event, air refueling test, callback function, callback time, Simulation Events, Time Synchronization, window only production environment, window time service, Windows GPS Time Synchronization, Windows multimedia library

@Booklet{EasyChair:2335,
  author = {Kyle Rebello},
  title = {Reliable Timestamping in Windows},
  howpublished = {EasyChair Preprint no. 2335},

  year = {EasyChair, 2020}}