The GIANO Project: Development of a Galileo-Based Timing Receiver for Increasing Critical Infrastructures Resilience

Thales Alenia Space in Italy, with the contribution of Business Integration Partners in Italy, DEIMOS Engenharia in Portugal, the Space Research Centre and Piktime Systems in Poland has been awarded the contract in the framework of the GSA "Fundamental Elements" program. The receiver is based on the last generation of Thales Alenia Space GNSS multi-constellation/multi-frequency receivers with heritage coming from several operational ground receiver stations. The receiver is intended to serve the professional market to improve the resilience of critical infrastructures and allow a range of timing services to be commercially deployed. The receiver uses signals from Galileo and GPS constellations, providing dual frequency capability on L1/E1 and L5/E5a bands. Moreover, exploitation of the Navigation Message Authentication Service, provided by the Galileo Open Service, is foreseen to protect the transmitted code. The proposed timing platform provides a disciplined oscillator solution, tailoring the performance to the user application needs. Since the inclusion of a timing receiver in a certified time distribution system implies the certification of the receiver itself, a continuous self-calibration approach is being studied to allow monitoring of internal delays along the full signal path. In addition, to ensure integrity of the RF path, from antenna down to the receiver (which is important for certification purposes), availability of delay measurements allow to compensate fluctuations due to environmental changes. The development has started in Q1 2019 and is currently in the design/development phase. This paper addresses the main results from the users survey that is driving the development, the receiver architecture and main design choices and the framework in which testing will be performed with several functional and performance verifications being scheduled in the second half of 2020 at the Space Research Centre in Poland, at the EU Joint Research Center in Ispra (Italy) and at INRIM in Torino (Italy).