Speaker
Description
As European NRENs come under pressure to meet the European Commission’s objectives of sovereign infrastructures for critical services, the distribution of high-accuracy Time and Frequency (T&F) has become a strategic priority. Following the release of the GN5-2 Whitepaper on Long-haul White Rabbit (WR) Time Distribution, this BoF session brings together the community and infrastructure partners to discuss the technical and economic roadmap for terrestrial time services in the R&E environment.
Global Navigation Satellite Systems (GNSS) are increasingly vulnerable to jamming and spoofing. This session will explore how the GÉANT community can leverage existing "legacy" DWDM fibre infrastructure to distribute a sub-nanosecond "ground truth" using White Rabbit technology, serving as a sovereign, resilient backup to satellite-based time.
This BoF will move beyond formal presentations to address the real-world challenges identified in the WR incubator report:
• Infrastructure Coexistence: Discuss the deployments and field trial experience of sharing fibres between WR and 400G coherent data traffic.
• Regeneration Strategies: Comparing the practical deployment of 1R (Optical BiDi Amplifiers), 2R (OEO), and 3R (WR Switches) across national borders.
• The Cost of Precision: Debating the economic trade-offs, regeneration methods, and spectrum allocation, specifically the use of L-band vs. C-band edges.
• Operational Readiness: Moving from "incubator" projects to "carrier-grade" services, including the need for standardized calibration and integrated SNMP monitoring.
In addition to these engineering challenges, the strategic priorities for NRENs and NMIs will be discussed.
BoF Agenda
• Intro (10 mins): Summary of the whitepaper's key performance results and associated recommendations.
• Industry/NREN Q&A (30 mins): Three 10-minute lightening talks by NREN/NMI engineers regarding network deployments and/or equipment vendors regarding WRS for time services.
• Roundtable Discussions (40 mins): Participants will be grouped by "deployment challenge" (e.g., Optical Layer vs. Economic/OAM) to identify common pain points.
• Next Steps (10 mins): Round table rapporteurs to summarize what NRENs would like to request from the WR Collaboration and from the GÉANT SIG-TFN.
The BoF organisers will invite key time service providers such as SURF, VTT, RISE/NETNOD and the White Rabbit collaboration to share their experiences of delivering time service. This will set the scene for the follow-up round-table discussion.
What will the TNC audience take away from your talk?
The session will be solution-focused and will discuss the challenges identified in the Incubator report:
• Infrastructure Coexistence: Discuss the deployments and field trial experience of sharing fibres between WR and 400G coherent data traffic.
• Regeneration Strategies: Comparing the practical deployment of 1R (Optical BiDi Amplifiers), 2R (OEO), and 3R (WR Switches) across national borders.
• The Cost of Precision: Debating the economic trade-offs, regeneration methods, and spectrum allocation, specifically the use of L-band vs. C-band edges.
• Operational Readiness: Moving from "incubator" projects to "carrier-grade" services, including the need for standardized calibration and integrated SNMP monitoring.
The audience will also gather a deeper appreciation of the strategic context for the need for WR-based time services, the background is summarised here:
Research and education networks are increasingly supporting use cases that depend on precise, traceable, and resilient time distribution. These include large-scale scientific infrastructures such as particle physics experiments, radio astronomy arrays, and distributed detectors, as well as telecommunications networks, data centres, energy systems, and financial platforms requiring accurate timestamping.
Many of these systems currently rely on Global Navigation Satellite Systems (GNSS), such as GPS and Galileo, for time synchronisation. However, GNSS signals are vulnerable to jamming and spoofing and are not always available indoors, creating a need for complementary terrestrial solutions.
White Rabbit (WR) is an open, Ethernet-based timing and data transfer technology developed at CERN that enables sub-nanosecond synchronisation over optical fibre networks. It combines IEEE 1588 Precision Time Protocol (PTP) and Synchronous Ethernet (SyncE), using hardware timestamping and delay compensation to achieve deterministic and highly accurate time transfer. Originally developed for particle accelerators, WR has since been adopted in multiple domains and incorporated into the IEEE 1588-2019 High Accuracy profile.
White Rabbit is already deployed or evaluated in a range of European infrastructures. These include large scientific facilities such as CERN, the FAIR accelerator, the KM3NeT neutrino telescope, and the EISCAT 3D radar, all of which require precise synchronisation across geographically distributed systems. It is also identified as suitable for radio astronomy and distributed sensor arrays, aligning with the requirements of infrastructures such as SKA-Low.
In addition, WR has been used in European projects to distribute GNSS-derived time over fibre and to support terrestrial timing architectures combining atomic clocks, GNSS calibration, and fibre-based time transfer. It is also applied in metrology, long-distance time transfer, telecommunications, energy systems, and financial infrastructures.
These developments create an opportunity for GÉANT and NRENs to leverage their existing fibre infrastructure to distribute high-precision, traceable time signals, support GNSS-resilient architectures, and enable new services.
| Are you a first time speaker at TNC? | No |
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