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Feature #8: Maximum Clock Skew

Explore how to identify the maximum clock skew between ancestor and descendant nodes in an n-ary tree network. Learn to apply depth-first search to measure timing differences, improving your understanding of synchronization challenges in 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. ...