Self-Stabilizing, Distributed, Symmetric, Fault-Tolerant Synchronization

Distributed systems have become an integral part of safety-critical computing applications, necessitating system designs that incorporate complex fault-tolerant resource management functions to provide globally coordinated operations with ultra-reliability. As a result, robust clock synchronization has become a required fundamental component of fault-tolerant, safety-critical distributed systems. Since physical oscillators are inherently imperfect, local clocks of nodes of a distributed system, driven by these oscillators, do not keep perfect time and can drift with respect to real time and one another. Thus, the local clocks of the nodes must periodically be re-synchronized. As a result, a fault-tolerant system needs a clock synchronization algorithm that tolerates imprecise local clocks and faulty behavior by some processes.