Critical infrastructure
Time and timing distribution has become increasingly important for Critical Infrastructure sectors such as communications, energy, transportation, emergency services, financial services, and cloud data centers. The actual source of time information is most often provided by the so called “Grandmaster clock”, which is essentially a high quality frequency source (atomic clocks) combined with a steering GNSS receiver to produce legally recognized UTC time. Now, such high quality Grandmaster clocks provide great value to their owners, but in case they receive inaccurate or wrong information from the steering GNSS receiver, their stability could become unpredictable.
Due to this over-reliance on GNSS any GNSS failure could have a potential to adversely impact national economy. A study done in UK showed a price tag of £1 billion per day for a five day disruption. The report assumes telecom networks have long holdover capabilities (> 5 days).
National Timing Grid
What we would like to suggest is to combine, or rather interlink as many of Ireland’s atomic clocks as possible to establish a National Timing Grid. We are hoping to bring on board any party that has a caesium atomic clock available for contribution of clock data remotely.
The benefits of such a grid are:
- Near real time tracking of stability against other atomic clocks – early warnings in case of performance degradation.
- Direct traceability to UTC through UTC(NSAI) instead of UTC through GNSS (e.g., UTC(NIST) through GPS time).
- Improved holdover in case of GNSS degradation through a common timescale observation and steering.
- GNSS time stability observation (GPS, Galileo, BeiDou, GLONASS) and failure detection.
We assume that participants of the project will receive the above benefits for free – no costs involved. However, there are requirements on the time dissemination equipment (e.g. atomic clock quality, GNSS receiver, etc.). The details are explained in the attached slides.
Please let us know if you are interested at the following email address. We would be more than happy to arrange an opportunity to discuss this prospect with you further subject to your availability.