Time as a Service Based on White Rabbit for Finance Applications

Abstract

The finance industry is being pushed by regulation to register most of its operations with timestamps legally traceable to a Coordinated Universal Time reference with up to 1 ms error. This poses a challenge for the sector, since the most commonly used solutions to provide time in the industry might not comply with the requirements. While the typical network-based solutions might not be able to reach the needed level of time accuracy when used in large networks, the satellite-based options can easily be subject to external interference or attacks. Additionally, both approaches struggle when traceability to legal time is required. Our proposed service consists in offering the performance of White Rabbit time transfer over commercial optical fiber networks, the accuracy of atomic clocks continuously compared to the legal time reference, and the resiliency of a client node with holdover capabilities better than 1.5 ms after 24 hours. This design has already been put into place to provide a time service to the Spanish stock market operator. Our approach is easily scalable and can be used to provide a future-proof time as a service solution to a large number of customers from a single location.