A Comparative Study of Methods of Clock Ensemble Development

An ensemble of clocks is the first step towards the realization of a timescale. A timescale is the estimate of phase and frequency of the “perfect” clock derived from the phase and frequency of the clocks which participate in the ensemble. Three methods of clock ensembling viz. a Kalman filter based formulation, a multi-scale ensemble timescale based on minimizing the ADEV and an ensemble using artificial neural networks have been discussed in this paper and a comparative study has been performed.