How to measure the jitter in various comm protocols

[Grampa_of_Oliva_n_Eden]

This is a cross post from the NI forum found here.

http://forums.ni.com/ni/board/message?boar...=266977#M266977

I hope someone on this forum can offer some ideas or advice.

Before I spend to much time re-inventing the wheel, I would like to hear your thoughts on how to measure the jitter in various comm protocols. To start, I'll get a couple of high end PXI Chassis and code in RT. I'll also get the best timer boards avaiable for both chasis. What I want to be able to do is to characterize the determinism of various comm methods. Specificly, I want to measure the "jitter" for each comm method under a variety of loads. The high end comm schemes (Reflective memory, Fibre Channel ) should have jitter on the order of microseconds or possilble nanoseconds. Out of the box ethernet on a dedicated network may be on the order of seconds. So..... If you have any ideas solutions or "show-stoppers" you would like to share, please feel frre to reply. I thank you for reading this post! Ben