Highly scalable dissemination of traceable time to edge devices by distributed ledgers

Computer timing is an invisible utility which underpins a very wide range of activities such as getting power into homes operating financial markets the Internet of Things (IoT), health, insurance, transport and even payments systems, including the Central Bank Digital Currency systems being considered by most central banks. Many applications, covering millions of devices, require accurate time which is fully and verifiably traceable back to a source such as the National Physics Laboratory.

This highly innovative project will deliver, for the first time, mass distribution of accurate traceable time at very low cost. It will significantly extend NPL's reach, will integrate new more efficient technologies such as traceable hash ledgers and will effectively "democratise" time, making its benefits available to any industry and associated edge devices. Transaction logging and confirmation will be exceptionally fast compared to traditional blockchain and avoids the Proof of Work that is so energy intensive and environmentally damaging.

Our dependency on timing cannot be under-estimated, but we are potentially vulnerable, especially to disruptions to the satellite supply of timing signals. In the extreme, according to government sources, the UK economy could be £1 billion a day worse off. Hoptroff has pioneered low-cost networked time synchronisation solution. We are uniquely positioned to create a fallback option for loss of GNSS connectivity all the way to the Edge to increase the resilience and security of Critical National Infrastructure.

Our proposed solution is to facilitate access to UTC(NPL) via cloud-deployed software boundary clock software. Each software boundary clock then provides local fanout of time to tens of thousands of edge devices and act together as a distributed hash ledger. The three components that need to be developed and proven are:

1. Establishment of traceability to UTC(NPL) via NPL's time dissemination demarcation point at Telehouse, London E14 to Hoptroff's timing network.
2. Development of PTP boundary clock & ledger software that disseminates time from local cloud data centres to edge devices. This software will also log communications to edge devices in a hash ledger to immutably record events on the edge devices.
3. Development of plug-and-play edge device APIs that securely seek out the time delivery network and synchronize to it, completing the resilient unbroken chain of comparisons from NPL to edge devices. We plan to prove two example APIs (Windows and Linux), with later extension to Web (JavaScript), mobile (Swift/Android) and embedded electronics (C for microcontrollers).