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AI Features

Feature #8: Maximum Clock Skew

Explore how to identify the maximum clock skew between routers in a network structured as an n-ary tree. This lesson teaches you to use a depth-first search approach to track time values across nodes and compute the largest difference, aiding in tuning distributed consensus algorithms.

Description

Our network topology consists of routers interconnected in a tree structure. Messages are forwarded in this structure from ancestor nodes to descendant nodes. A system’s clock time value is stored in tree nodes representing the routers. We want to tune a distributed consensus algorithm that is parameterized by the maximum clock skew in a forwarding path. The clock skew can be defined as the difference between the time values of two routers in a network. The messages are forwarded over our tree from ancestors to descendants or vice versa. We want to find the maximum clock skew that we can encounter while forwarding the messages in the tree.

It is established that these time values cannot be the same, and clock skew is unavoidable. ...