Modeling and Simulation of the Sliding Window Algorithm for Fault-Tolerant Clock Synchronization

Manfred J. PFLUEGL  Douglas M. BLOUGH  

Publication
IEICE TRANSACTIONS on Information and Systems   Vol.E75-D   No.6   pp.792-796
Publication Date: 1992/11/25
Online ISSN: 
DOI: 
Print ISSN: 0916-8532
Type of Manuscript: Special Section PAPER (Special Issue on Pacific Rim International Symposium on Fault Tolerant Systems)
Category: 
Keyword: 
clock synchronization,  distributed systems,  fault-tolerant computing,  

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Summary: 
Synchronous clocks are an essential requirement for a variety of distributed system applications. Many of these applications are safety-critical and require fault tolerance. In this paper, a general probabilistic clock synchronization model is presented. This model is uniformly probabilistic, incorporating random message delays, random clock drifts, and random fault occurrences. The model allows faults in any system component and of any type. Also, a new Sliding Window Clock Synchronization Algorithm (SWA) providing increased fault tolerance is proposed. The probabilistic model is used for an evaluation of SWA which shows that SWA is capable of tolerating significantly more faults than other algorithms and that the synchronization tightness is as good or better than that of other algorithms.