Call for Papers
WSTS 2027 seeks papers that advance the understanding of synchronization and timing systems. The WSTS Steering Group encourages submissions from both practitioners and researchers. Please choose a technical area from the list of the links below. Then, click “Submit an Abstract” to learn more about presentation guidelines and how to submit your proposal.
Submission Deadline: Thursday, October 15th
Choose a Technical Area
Novel Core Timing and Frequency Technologies
This technical area focuses on new developments, breakthroughs, and forward-looking innovations on foundational technologies, architectures, standards, and measurement techniques used to generate, distribute, transfer, and synchronize time and frequency. It is intended for foundational timing technologies rather than operational deployments or application-specific implementations.
We seek contributions that introduce novel updates, disruptive concepts, or advance the state of the art in timing generation, distribution, transfer, measurement, and synchronization technologies. Example areas of interest include, but are not limited to:
- Advances in PTP, SyncE, NTP, and related synchronization protocols, including enhanced robustness, interoperability, performance, and next-generation capabilities
- Advances in GNSS timing architectures, augmentation techniques, and timing performance
- Time and frequency transfer technologies (terrestrial, wireless, optical, and satellite)
- Next-generation oscillator technologies including quartz, MEMS, atomic, microwave, and optical clocks
- New approaches to clock architectures and timing system design, and related testing and validation techniques
- Time scales and timing ensembles
- Data/Traffic or In-band Network-based timing distribution architectures
- Advances in synchronization standards, interoperability, and performance characterization
- Novel timing technologies and unconventional synchronization methods
Trusted and Resilient Timing
This technical area focuses on ensuring accurate, trusted, secure, and resilient timing in the presence of failures, attacks, interference, degraded conditions, or loss of primary timing sources. It is intended for resilience, trust, integrity, and security challenges rather than synchronization architectures or application-specific deployments.
We seek contributions that improve the trustworthiness, integrity, availability, and resilience of timing systems, or innovative strategies for trusted and resilient timing. Example areas of interest include, but are not limited to:
- Complementary PNT and Alternative PNT
- Timing integrity monitoring and assurance
- Timing security architectures and threat‑resilient designs
- GNSS spoofing, jamming, and interference detection
- Trusted timing distribution and verification
- Holdover technologies and performance analysis
- Multi-source timing architectures for robustness and redundancy
- Timing resilience for critical infrastructure
- Assured timing for aerospace and defense systems
- Telecom, power grid, and financial timing resilience strategies and advanced monitoring techniques
- Advanced network monitoring techniques
- Failure detection, mitigation, and recovery techniques
Distributed Systems Synchronization, Coordination, and Observability
This technical area focuses on synchronization challenges associated with distributed systems where timing enables coordination, observability, scheduling, monitoring, diagnostics, and system correctness. Contributions should emphasize system architectures, methodologies, analysis techniques, observability frameworks, and coordination mechanisms rather than deployment experiences or operational case studies.
We seek contributions that demonstrate how timing is used to coordinate, monitor, analyze, and improve distributed systems. Example areas of interest include, but are not limited to:
- Data center synchronization
- Multi-cloud timing architectures
- AI infrastructure synchronization
- Distributed observability and telemetry
- Event ordering and causality analysis
- Time-aware scheduling and orchestration
- Root cause analysis using timing information
- Distributed control systems
- Hybrid infrastructure synchronization
- Financial trading infrastructure timing
- Smart grid monitoring and control
- Network coordination and synchronization
- Timing-aware diagnostics and fault analysis
Emerging Systems and Applications
This technical area focuses on new and evolving domains where timing and synchronization are becoming critical enablers of performance, reliability, autonomy, trust, and future infrastructure. It is intended for emerging and forward-looking applications and emerging system behavior rather than established deployments or foundational timing technologies. Contributions should focus on synchronization, timing, coordination, and observability challenges associated with emerging systems rather than the underlying application domain itself.
We seek contributions that explore novel applications and related requirements, emerging architectures, and future synchronization challenges. Example areas of interest include, but are not limited to:
- AI-native systems and autonomous agents
- Autonomous systems and robotics
- Quantum timing and quantum networks
- Space infrastructure and orbital data centers
- Space interconnection and inter-orbital synchronization
- Next-generation public infrastructure
- Edge computing environments
- Future network architectures
- Time-sensitive applications in emerging industries
- Research innovations in synchronization systems
- Novel synchronization use-cases and experimental architectures
Operational and Deployment Experiences
This technical area focuses on practical implementation, deployment, operation, validation, troubleshooting, and lessons learned from real-world synchronization systems. Contributions should emphasize operational experience, deployment results, performance measurements, field observations, best practices, and lessons learned, rather than proposing new synchronization architectures or methodologies.
We seek contributions that share operational experience and practical insights gained through deployment and field operations. Example areas of interest include, but are not limited to:
- Large-scale synchronization deployment
- Telecom deployment experiences
- Power grid deployment experiences
- Transportation infrastructure experiences
- Aerospace and defense deployment experiences
- Financial infrastructure deployment experiences
- Migration and modernization efforts
- Operational monitoring and maintenance
- Troubleshooting synchronization failures
- Performance measurements and field validation
- Operational scaling challenges
- Failure analysis and recovery experiences
- Lessons learned and best practices
- Case studies from production environments
How to Develop a Competitive Submission
Papers will be accepted based on the content of your abstract. Achieving a talk from the main stage is competitive. We routinely get more proposals than we have slots for talks. In choosing talks, we value innovation. We avoid accepting talks that appear to repeat a previous talk. We continually strive to accept papers that focus on technical results and have no marketing.
Proposed papers should advance the understanding, implementation, operation, resilience, and observability of synchronization and timing systems. Submissions are welcome from all industries that rely on precise timing and synchronization, including (but not limited to) power and utilities, telecommunications, data centers, aerospace and defense, finance, and broadcast. Contributions may address foundational timing technologies, deployment experiences, emerging applications, or synchronization challenges across diverse infrastructure domains.
Talks and Posters
Presentations can be given either from the main stage or as Posters. You can choose to submit your proposal to any area as a Poster. A poster presentation gives the speaker an opportunity to discuss their paper in detail with interested parties. Historically, poster presentations have had lively discussions, and WSTS has had room for all the posters that authors wanted to present.
What to Expect
We will either reject outright or PROVISIONALLY accept a paper as a talk or a poster. We need to see a near-final version of the presentation about six weeks before the conference. We require this time in advance, because we need time for our team to carefully review the proposed presentations, and then because, following this, we often ask for changes. These requests can include suggestions and/or requirements to improve the technical orientation of the paper, a need to reduce the length of the presentation to fit in the available time slot, and to remove marketing material, such as product names or model numbers. The response to our requests following the six-week early deadline can require a new draft within 2 weeks, which we then need time to review again and work with the authors collaboratively to optimize the final presentations. At any point in this process, the proposal may be rejected.
Industries and Infrastructure Domains
| Aerospace Defense | Transportation |
| Telecom | Power & Utilities |
| Broadcast | Data Centers |
| Finance | AI & Quantum |
Ready to Submit?
Submission Deadline: Thursday, October 15th