Marching to Many Different Drummers

Timothy Mann

Leslie Lamport

Systems Research Center

Digital Equipment Corporation

Abstract

We address the problem of determining the time in a network where a node may obtain information indirectly from primary time sources via intermediate nodes. Our key idea is to transmit and store each time datum as a pair, consisting of a time interval and a "failure predicate", a boolean expression that indicates precisely which combinations of node failures could invalidate the interval. We describe some techniques based on this idea, but not a complete system design or implementation.
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