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Timestamp system for causal broadcast communication

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Abstract

In unreliable asynchronous distributed systems with failures, achieving a causal view of the system across all processes is a challenging task. The Causal Reliable Broadcast (CRB) abstraction is used to solve this task. When CRB is implemented with algorithms that use logical vector clocks to timestamp broadcast events, the causal relationships between broadcast events can be detected with maximal accuracy. However, this timestamping mechanism used by CRB might not be useful for systems that need to reason about the causal relationships among both broadcast and delivery events. To address this challenge, the paper proposes a Causal Timestamp System (CTS) based on vector clocks that timestamps broadcast and delivery events capturing with maximal accuracy the causal relationships among those events. CTS simplifies the formal verification and testing of implementations of CRB algorithms based on CTS. Additionally, a new Global State Monitoring (GSM) algorithm is proposed, tailored to a distributed system that uses CRB with CTS. GSM enables finer-grained assessment of global states and application-dependent predicates of that system. We clarify these concepts with an IoT example.

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Acknowledgements

We want to thank the reviewers for their comments on our paper. This research has been partially funded by the Community of Madrid, under grant EDGEDATA-CM (P2018/TCS-4499), the Spanish Research Council, under grant QoSData (PID2020-119461GB-I00) and by URJC, under grant OpenSSDWMN 5 G (URJC 2022/00004/017).

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Universidad Rey Juan Carlos, Campus de Móstoles, 28933, Móstoles, Madrid, Spain

    Isabel Muñoz-Fernández

  2. Escuela Técnica Superior de Ingeniería de Sistemas Informáticos, Universidad Politécnica de Madrid, Campus Sur, 28031, Madrid, Spain

    Sergio Arévalo-Viñuales

  3. Escuela de Ingeniería de Fuenlabrada, Universidad Rey Juan Carlos, Campus de Fuenlabrada, Fuenlabrada, 28942, Madrid, Spain

    Pedro de-las-Heras-Quirós

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  1. Isabel Muñoz-Fernández
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  3. Pedro de-las-Heras-Quirós
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Correspondence to Isabel Muñoz-Fernández.

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Muñoz-Fernández, I., Arévalo-Viñuales, S. & de-las-Heras-Quirós, P. Timestamp system for causal broadcast communication. J Supercomput (2024). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11227-024-06187-6

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