During the first phase of the project, from the kick-off meeting to the System Requirement Review, the team analyzed the State of the Art and proposed a network topology, which served for the following WP and mainly for the experimental phase. In parallel, a first market assessment was carried out and the dissemination and communication activities were planned. In the second phase of the project, from the System Requirement Review until the Mid Term Review, the team focused on the preparation of the experimental phase, which included the development of the ROOT solution (i.e.: WR-Z16 devices embedding the Mosaic-T GNSS rx), the definition of the test plan as well as the preparation of interfering and cyber-security attacks. The market analysis passed to a more detailed phase, whereas the first dissemination actions were implemented.
From the Mid Term Review, the team was involved in WP3 which involved the preparation and execution of experimental tests, as well as the critical review of the results. Here, the COVID-19 pandemic has had a significant impact. Therefore, the project timetable has been completely re-evaluated, taking into account new developments and constraints deriving from the state of emergency. It is worth remembering that even the dissemination and communication activities (WP5) planned through the participation of people in workshops and conferences had to be canceled or replaced with online events. This helped change the dissemination strategy and constitutes one of the lessons learned from the project. With the 3-month extension of the project agreed and granted by the EC, the Consortium was able to recover the delays and successfully carry out the second batch of tests in Madrid. The actual duration of the project was therefore 21 months, instead of the original 18: the extension allowed the achievement of most of the original objectives, as reported in D6.2 “Recommendations for the follow up of the project”.
In the last phase, from the Review of the Experimental Evidence to the Final Review, the project focused on the critical review of the results. This phase served to evaluate actual results against the original goals, assess deviations and derive recommendations. Overall, it can be concluded that the project has demonstrated novel GNSS-based network synchronization devices that are resilient to intentional GNSS interference and cyber attacks. Processing new authenticated signals, such as OSNMA, is an added value for timing applications. GNSS authentication increases the complexity of successful spoofing attacks, which in turn become less likely. The project demonstrated that it is crucial to protect the GNSS receiver as a whole, not only from RF interference, but also from cyber attacks against its software. The technical results were integrated with market-related analyzes. A solid business plan and sustainable market entry strategy were defined to introduce the ROOT solution to the market at the end of the project.
