Speaker
Description
The KM3NeT neutrino detectors, currently under construction in the Mediterranean Sea, are designed to measure high-energy cosmic neutrinos and their properties. To exploit the Cherenkov effect as the detection technique, the ARCA and ORCA detectors are deployed at two abyssal sites, off the coasts of southern Italy and France, respectively. Operating in such an extreme deep-sea environment, the detectors rely on a robust, high-performance networking architecture that ensures negligible data loss and precise time synchronisation across thousands of distributed detector modules.
Given the impossibility of routine maintenance operations for such submarine installations, the electronics integrated in each detection module are deliberately kept as simple and robust as possible to ensure decades-long operational stability. Consequently, no data filtering is performed underwater, and all acquired data are continuously streamed to shore. This "all-data-to-shore" architecture shifts event selection and data processing to onshore facilities, imposing stringent requirements on network throughput, latency, and synchronisation accuracy.
This contribution outlines the primary design constraints of the KM3NeT networking system and discusses the rationale behind the adopted architecture and technologies. The offshore communication and timing systems are described in detail, while the main features of the onshore infrastructure are also presented, providing a complete overview of the end-to-end data transmission chain of the detector.