Navy shipboard time synchronization service options and analysis

Next generation Navy platform designs are evolving towards generalized multipurpose infrastructures based on open standards and commercial products. These platforms will support a wide range of new and expanding applications in a more flexible and dynamic manner than in previous designs. These applications are increasingly being more finely partitioned and distributed over this generalized infrastructure with defined open interfaces. This new paradigm creates significant time synchronization challenges. Time sensitive applications that have previously been implemented in a single computer are now distributed across multiple computers over a network. IEEE 1588 (also known as PTP) has been identified as a potential open standards-based technology utilizing existing infrastructure to meet these requirements. This paper discusses next generation Navy shipboard infrastructures, emerging Navy applicationpsilas time service requirements, results from preliminary experiments, and future directions in design, test, and evaluation in support of next generation Navy network time synchronization requirements.