Scalable Electronic Adaptive Time Integration for Maritime Environments (SEA-TIME)

Military systems are reliant on the Global Positioning System (GPS) for position, navigation, and timing (PNT). The US Navy is tasked with connecting, improving, and expanding over-the-air tactical network functionality for new and evolving future warfighting capabilities in GPS-denied environments. A robust, scalable time synchronization system is essential for this mission. Toyon Research Corporation is proposing to develop the SEA-TIME (“Scalable Electronic Adaptive Time Integration for Maritime Environments”) system to deliver precision time synchronization to the Navy’s C-Band maritime network. SEA-TIME is based on Toyon’s prior work where we have demonstrated a wireless time synchronization algorithm with actual hardware. This proposed effort will improve algorithm design and show feasibility of these algorithms in meeting the Navy’s requirements for rapid, scalable time synchronization across a large number of nodes. The feasibility of the proposed approach will be investigated using both simulations and experiments using existing hardware. Provided the signal-to-noise ratio is sufficient, the performance is independent of the number and distance between nodes. At the conclusion of the effort, the algorithms will have been shown to be effective and we will have a plan to develop and fabricate a prototype system during a follow-on effort.