Time Protocol

The Time Protocol is a network protocol in the Internet Protocol Suite defined in 1983 in RFC 868 by Jon Postel and K. Harrenstein. Its purpose is to provide a site-independent, machine readable date and time. The Time Protocol is a network protocol in the Internet Protocol Suite defined in 1983 in RFC 868 by Jon Postel and K. Harrenstein. Its purpose is to provide a site-independent, machine readable date and time. The Time Protocol may be implemented over the Transmission Control Protocol (TCP) or the User Datagram Protocol (UDP). A host connects to a server that supports the Time Protocol on port 37. The server then sends the time as a 32-bit unsigned integer in binary format and in network byte order, representing the number of seconds since 00:00 (midnight) 1 January, 1900 GMT, and closes the connection. Operation over UDP requires the sending of any datagram to the server port, as there is no connection setup for UDP.