Problem Definition
Background and Overview
Coordinating processors located in different places is one of the fundamental problems in distributed computing. In his seminal work, Lamport [4,5] studied the model where the only source of coordination is message exchange between the processors; the time that elapses between successive steps at the same processor, as well as the time spent by a message in transit, may be arbitrarily large or small. Lamport observed that in this model, called the asynchronous model, temporal concepts such as “past” and “future” are derivatives of causal dependence, a notion with a simple algorithmic interpretation. The work of Patt-Shamir and Rajsbaum [10] can be viewed as extending Lamport's qualitative treatment with quantitative concepts. For example, a statement like “event a happened before event b” may be refined to a statement like “event a happened at least 2 time units and at most 5 time units before event b”. This is in contrast to most previous...
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Patt-Shamir, B. (2008). Clock Synchronization. In: Kao, MY. (eds) Encyclopedia of Algorithms. Springer, Boston, MA. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-0-387-30162-4_72
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