Resilience in Timing – Do You Really Need Sacrifices?

Have you noticed that many critical infrastructure services are extremely important to your life yet at the same time, you forget about them and consider them a normal part of life – services so expected and crucial that you don’t worry about them? You just assume they will exist and always be there. 

Think of mobile for instance. You expect LTE or 5G to be there, wherever you go and whenever you wish to use your browser, your social media app. It needs to be there, but you never worry about it. It’s the same for your water, electricity, subway and train, and the airplane you plan to fly on. These are services your carriers provide or the state or municipality provides – and even your protection via armed forces. All of these are critical and at the same time, so expected you may forget they exist as you go about your daily activities. 

The reason is that these services are very reliable. They depend on redundant infrastructure and on resilient solutions that guarantee strength in case something goes wrong.  

And these services work, uninterrupted, because precise timing and highly accurate synchronization are working behind the scenes. Precise timing is a critical technology so reliable that you don’t even realize you depend on it every day. 

Infrastructure Redundancy 

Let’s examine a very important consideration for infrastructure service operators that needs to be assessed when they are selecting a precise timing solution: redundancy. They certainly don’t want you to lose your 5G service for instance, if an event brings network down or if GPS is jammed, spoofed or if a grandmaster in the deployment begins to fail. Redundancy is what people call a Plan B. In other words, what is Plan B if Plan A fails? One key question in that regard is whether compromises and tradeoffs are acceptable when Plan B is triggered or whether the goal is to preserve all the capabilities in Plan A.   

That is where the design of redundancy in a precise timing grandmaster comes in. 

Operators can, for instance, consider a modular hardware grandmaster. That is probably the direction the industry would have taken in prior decades when the main approach was centralization. So, the prior framework would duplicate some capabilities in a module and the device would host two similar modules. One module is active, the other is in standby and takes over if there is an issue.  

It is a well-known design that has at least three major drawbacks. 

First it is an expensive design. The device needs to be architected in a modular way and that leads to much higher hardware costs than a “pizza box” style unit which is more common now. The second drawback is the fact the duplicated module is essentially consuming a slot in the unit which could have been used for other capabilities but now is unavailable, as duplication of one module prevents other features from being available. This is a sacrifice that challenges many operators. The third drawback is that only the duplicated module is redundant. All the other ports, all the other components of the device are not redundant. Modular hardware redundancy only offers partial redundancy, leaving the non-redundant parts of the unit at risk of potential failure.  

Trends for Today 

The alternative to these legacy approaches is to endorse two important trends becoming prevalent in the industry: distributed design and software. 

Instead of a module being duplicated inside the device, the industry has been moving toward more distributed architectures where functions are viewed from a logical standpoint – and these functions can be made available via various units distributed in the network. Examples include virtualization, Software Defined Network (SDN), network redundancy and others. Instead of creating an expensive modular hardware design, the trend is to adopt a pair of lower-cost devices that are paired as active/standby, can be linked in the network and do not need to be hosted inside the same device. 

The other trend is to move from a hardware-dependent frame of mind toward a more flexible design where software enables innovation, independent of the hardware per se, and can be loaded on systems already deployed in the field. In other words, ensuring operators can select future-proof investments, bringing redundancy innovation without requiring new hardware investments. 

Redundancy via a software upgrade enables operators to avoid sacrifices and tradeoffs. No module prevents capabilities from being available – and all features and all ports in the system are available for use. Redundancy adds a critical element and no existing or potential capabilities are lost. With software redundancy, operators can rely on precise timing without thinking about it every day. 

Microchip’s TimeProvider® 4100 is a device that can be used in various locations with different purposes and configurations. This innovative technology – including the new TimeProvider 4100 version 2.2 – provides top performance, accuracy and precision using proven timing technology in operation around the world. 

Now that you know this technology family exists, rely on the performance of a proven solution. Explore TimeProvider® 4100 and Microchip’s leadership and expertise in timing and synchronization, serving diverse industries worldwide. Contact Microchip directly for more information or contact our channel partner. Let Microchip’s expertise, innovation and proven solutions meet your timing requirements.