Time dissemination services: The experimental results of the European H2020 DEMETRA project

In 2015 and 2016 a European Consortium of 15 scientific and industrial partners from 8 different countries collaborates on the DEMETRA (DEMonstrator of EGNSS services based on Time Reference Architecture) project, funded by the European Union in the frame of the Horizon 2020 program, aimed at developing and experimenting time dissemination services based on the European GNSS. The project aims at being a prototype of an European time dissemination service, based on the timing signal of the Galileo system, adding particular features like — among the others — certification, calibration, or integrity, that could be of interest to a wide range of users belonging to different sectors as traffic control, energy distribution, finance, telecom, and scientific institutions. Nine time dissemination services are proposed. The project is under experimentation since March 2016, we report the first experimentation results of the system, showing potentialities and limits of the proposed services, aiming to foster the development and possibly standardization of the time dissemination services.