Drift (telecommunication)

Drift (telecommunication): In telecommunication, a drift is a comparatively long-term change in an attribute, value, or operational parameter of a system or equipment. The drift should be characterized, such as "diurnal frequency drift" and "output level drift." Drift is usually undesirable and unidirectional, but may be bidirectional, cyclic, or of such long-term duration and low excursion rate as to be negligible.^[1]

Drift is also common in pseudo-synchronised streaming applications, such as low-latency audio streaming over TCP/IP. Normally both ends of a streaming connection would stay in-sync with a master clock but TCP/IP does not provide this 'master clock' mechanism. Therefore applications running fixed clocks will drift apart over time and glitches will occur. This is usually fixed by controlling jitter or drift, by slightly altering the clock speed at one end of the connection.

Drift can be removed from signals by signal combination. This strategy is used in optical and electrical systems such as optical tweezers. ^[2]

References

^ Federal Standard 1037C

^ Mashaghi et al. Noise reduction by signal combination in Fourier space applied to drift correction in optical tweezers, Rev. Sci. Instrum. 82, 115103 (2011)

MIL-STD-188

See also

Wander

Clock drift

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