A financial trading organization plans to monitor the network latency for multicast data feeds on a hop-by-hop basis. Which technology should be added to their design to support this requirement?

Question

Options

• ASPAN
• BNBAR
• CIPFIX
• DPrecision Time Protocol

• A
  4% (1)
• B
  17% (4)
• C
  4% (1)
• D
  74% (17)

Explanation

Precision Time Protocol (IEEE 1588) enables network devices to act as transparent clocks, stamping packets with nanosecond-precision timestamps at each hop and recording the residence time a frame spends inside each switch. Financial trading firms need this sub-microsecond visibility into multicast feed latency across every network segment, which is exactly what PTP's hop-by-hop correction field mechanism provides.

Why the distractors are wrong:

• A. SPAN mirrors traffic to a capture device for analysis but provides no timing information at intermediate hops - it's for packet inspection, not latency measurement.
• B. NBAR performs deep packet inspection to classify application traffic for QoS policies; it has no mechanism to measure or report per-hop delay.
• C. IPFIX exports flow-level statistics (byte counts, packet counts, flow start/end times) from a single device, but it cannot track a multicast packet's journey and latency across each individual hop.

Memory tip: Think "Precise Time = Per-hop Tracing." In financial trading, microseconds equal money, so you need a Protocol that Tracks Precisely - PTP. The other three tools (SPAN, NBAR, IPFIX) are all about what traffic is, not when it arrived at each node.

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