Exponential degrading of NTP synchronization with number of network hops

Time synchronization using the Network Time Protocol (NTP) has increased with the growth of the Internet. There are hundreds of public NTP servers in the world. Conventional client software selects a peer/server using packet delay jitter statistics for some manually listed servers, even though it is commonly understood that the nearest NTP server should be used. We demonstrate that NTP synchronization degrades with the number of network hops. The hop count indicates the number of routers on the network path, which is where most jitter and packet loss occur. The accuracy of client time synchronization degrades exponentially with hop count. We propose a round-trip hop-counts-capable NTP server response for the accurate selection of the nearest server.