cnPRTC - Coherent Network Primary Reference Time Clock: A Geographically Distributed Resilient Timescale for Telecommunications

This article describes a new work item under study at the International Telecommunications Union (ITU) standards development organization to provide highly accurate, resilient time throughout a telecommunications network, the coherent network primary reference time clock (cnPRTC). While the traditional approach for delivering time and frequency to a network has involved deploying a number of independent sources of time and frequency, such as the PRTC or enhanced PRTC (ePRTC) along with hierarchical connections to these sources, the cnPRTC adds to this high-accuracy time and frequency connections between sources to combine them for improved accuracy and greatly improved resilience. The result is not simply a clock, but rather what is termed a timescale, much as universal coordinated time (UTC) is the result of combining the best standalone clocks in the world.

Automated summary

This article introduces a new work item, the cnPRTC, being studied by the International Telecommunications Union (ITU) to provide highly accurate and resilient time for telecommunications networks. Unlike traditional approaches, the cnPRTC combines multiple independent sources of time and frequency to improve accuracy and resilience, creating a timescale concept.