LES ULIS, France - Orolia announced that its team has been awarded an up to 1.7 million Euro grant by the European Global Satellite Navigation Systems Agency (GSA) to develop a resilient time and frequency server to protect critical Global Navigation Satellite System (GNSS)-reliant systems. The Galileo Authenticated Robust Timing System (GEARS) project will deliver accurate and highly robust Galileo-based time and frequency data for critical infrastructure.
Critical infrastructure such as telecommunications, broadcast, data centers, transportation, energy generation/distribution, and finance rely on GNSS signals, and detailed studies have documented their vulnerability to threats from signal jamming or spoofing.
The GEARS program will fund the development of a timing system to validate GNSS signals and protect the Galileo system from GNSS threats, providing accurate and robust time in GNSS challenged environments. It will also provide a backup signal and timing reference if Galileo is unavailable.
The time server will leverage the new Galileo navigation data authentication signal to make it resilient to spoofing and utilize Orolia’s portfolio of interference detection and mitigation capabilities to increase resistance to jamming. The GEARS initiative will also develop a new standard for GNSS timing system protection by defining minimum testing criteria to qualify robustness against threats.
This two-year grant agreement with GSA will be coordinated by Orolia, collaborating with four European partners: FDC (France), NLR (Netherlands Aerospace Center, Netherlands), NLS - FGI (National Land Survey of Finland – Finnish Geospatial Research Institute, Finland) and NavCert (Germany). The prototype to be developed and validated will embed relevant new technologies and innovations to ensure maximum security and robustness for Galileo’s timing receivers by 2021.
