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Assured PNT for critical infrastructure

In-depth national defense

Precise timing is crucial to economies and any failure can create a risk to national security. But today’s critical infrastructure, such as transportation, communication, energy, finance, and data centers over-rely on GNSS-delivered PNT services. We say over-rely because weak satellite signals are subject to a variety of vulnerabilities and distortions. These may be natural or man-made attacks. Governments have issued guidelines to protect businesses and society from unavailability or compromised quality of PNT services, including US Executive Order 13905 issued in 2020. This was followed by the DHS Resilient PNT Conformance Framework and NIST PNT Cybersecurity Profile, as well as the new IEEE P1952 Standard for Resilient PNT User Equipment. These outline the need for swift deployment of mitigating controls to secure our economies and societies.

Figure 1: PNT cyber threats and GNSS vulnerabilities

Building time sync services with redundant grandmasters at scale

The Adtran family of Oscilloquartz accessSync™, edgeSync™ and coreSync™ grandmasters combine resilience and scale for any PNT application.
With our market-leading aPNT+™ platform, you can rely on assured PNT services even in the most adverse conditions.

AI-empowered management for full control and visibility

Our Ensemble Controller and Sync Director deliver real-time analytics of the end-to-end sync network for intelligent fail-safe prevention, response and recovery whenever problems arise.

Robust and resilient PNT for time sync services

The Adtran Oscilloquartz aPNT+™ solution delivers excellence in threat detection with multiple backup options alongside a comprehensive range of strategies for mitigating any fault. Offering the widest selection of clock options, Adtran’s extensive portfolio of scalable Oscilloquartz grandmaster devices features the industry’s most advanced multi-band, multi-constellation GNSS receiver technology. This provides operators of critical infrastructure with a solution toolbox equipped for any threat landscape.

Figure 2: aPNT+™ components

Autonomous magnetic and optical cesium atomic clocks

Our OSA 3220 and 3350 ePRC+ cesium atomic clocks provide ultra-accurate, resilient and stable timing at core sites.

Industry-leading jamming, spoofing and cyber threat defense

Our aPNT+™ platform provides spoofing, jamming and cyber threat detection so that any malicious activity can be identified immediately and timing can be derived from uncompromised sources. With our autonomous coreSync+ OSA 3350 optical cesium atomic backup clock, it exceeds even the most stringent industry timing requirements. Our edgeSync™ and coreSync™ grandmasters, the OSA 5422 and OSA 5430/40, provide integrated combiner functionality. With them we can create fully redundant ePRTC implementations with just two network elements. And the precision of our multi-band GNSS receivers meets strict PRTC-B specifications – even without an atomic cesium clock, which significantly reduces cost. With our market-leading aPNT+™ platform, you can rely on assured PNT services even in the most adverse conditions.

Figure 3: aPNT+™ platform overview

Safeguarding critical infrastructure

Our aPNT+™ technology is designed for the highest levels of resilience and robustness in the industry.

Trusted standard for assured PNT

With the resilient and robust design of our aPNT+™ platform, network operators can achieve enhanced level 4 resilience as defined in the DHS PNT Conformance Framework. This ensures the best possible protection against natural disasters, terrorist activities, and today’s all-time high frequency of cyber threats. As well as deliberate attacks, our solution protects against unintentional jamming or shadowing of antennas. It mitigates any technical failure such as defects of PNT devices or outages of underlying communication networks. Our automated management system will minimize human error and, with a high-degree of AI/ML-assisted assurance, operational problems are avoided. That’s why our platform is the trusted standard for assured PNT services. 

Figure 4: Industries that require in-depth defense of critical infrastructure

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