Online Incremental Clock Synchronization | Journal of Network and Systems Management
Skip to main content
Springer Nature Link
Log in

Online Incremental Clock Synchronization

  • Published:
Journal of Network and Systems Management Aims and scope Submit manuscript

Abstract

Time synchronization is a fundamental requirement for many services provided by distributed systems. For this purpose, several time synchronization protocols have been proposed. However, they either achieve high accuracy by adding further network traffic, even more than common protocols such as network time protocol and precision time protocol, or consume a lot of time in additional computations. An online distributed tracing and monitoring system, used to identify functional and performance problems in distributed systems, must offer high precision with minimum time overhead and system resource consumption. The aim of this paper is to propose an efficient algorithm for time synchronization in online mode, applicable for all distributed services. The proposed method in this paper addresses five key requirements for a practical solution in distributed systems. First, it provides microseconds scale accuracy, which is applicable for trace events with nanosecond timestamp granularity. Secondly, it does not require adding new network traffic, using the send and receive time of existing traffic. Thirdly, it synchronizes the distributed traces in average time complexity of O(1) per synchronization update. Fourthly, it updates online synchronization parameters immediately without latency. Finally, it iteratively refines the early estimates without requiring significant buffering of earlier data. Although we used this work for distributed trace synchronization, it is a general, fully incremental, continuous synchronization approach applicable to most synchronization purposes.

This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution to check access.

Access this article

Log in via an institution

Subscribe and save

Springer+ Basic
¥17,985 /Month
  • Get 10 units per month
  • Download Article/Chapter or eBook
  • 1 Unit = 1 Article or 1 Chapter
  • Cancel anytime
Subscribe now

Buy Now

Price includes VAT (Japan)

Instant access to the full article PDF.

Institutional subscriptions

Fig. 1
Fig. 2
Fig. 3
Fig. 4
Fig. 5
Fig. 6
Fig. 7
Fig. 8
Fig. 9
Fig. 10
Fig. 11
Fig. 12
Fig. 13
Fig. 14

Similar content being viewed by others

References

  1. Marouani, H., Dagenais, M.: Internal clock drift estimation in computer clusters. J. Comput. Syst. Netw. Commun. 2008(1), 1–7 (2008)

    Google Scholar 

  2. Jasperneite, J., Shehab, K., Weber, K.: Enhancements to the time synchronization standard IEEE-1588 for a system of cascaded bridges. In: IEEE International Workshop on Factory Communication Systems, pp. 239–244 (2004)

  3. Desnoyers, M.: Low-Impact Operating System Tracing, Ph.D. thesis, École Polytechnique de Montréal (2009)

  4. Duda, A., Harrus, G., Haddad, Y., Bernard, G.: Estimating global time in distributed system. In: Proceedings of 7th International Conference on Distributed Computing Systems, Berlin (1987)

  5. Jabbarifar, M., Shameli-Sendi, A., Pedram, H., Dehghan, M., Dagenais, M.: L-SYNC: larger degree clustering based time-synchronisation for wireless sensor network. In: Eighth ACIS International Conference on Software Engineering Research, Management and Applications, pp. 171–178 (2010)

  6. Moon, S.B., Skelly, P., Towsley, D.: Estimation and removal of clock skew from network delay measurements. In: INFOCOM (1999)

  7. Ashton, P.: Algorithms for off-line clock synchronization. University of Canterbury, Department of Computer Science, Technical report (1995)

  8. Poirier, B., Roy, R., Dagenais, M.: Accurate offline synchronization of distributed traces using kernel-level events. Oper. Syst. Rev. 44, 75–87 (2010)

    Article  MATH  Google Scholar 

  9. Jabbarifar, M., Shameli-Sendi, A., Sadighian, A., Ezzati-Jivan, N., Dagenais, M.: A reliable and efficient time synchronization protocol for heterogeneous wireless sensor network. J. Wirel. Sens. Netw. 2(12), 910–918 (2010)

    Article  Google Scholar 

  10. Clement, E., Dagenais, M.: Trace synchronization in distributed networks. J. Comput. Syst. Netw. Commun. 2009(5), 11 (2009)

  11. NIST Time and frequency from A to Z., February 2011. http://tf.nist.gov/general/glossary.htm

  12. Jabbarifar, M., Roy, R., Dagenais, M., Shameli-Sendi, A.: Optimum off-line trace synchronization of computer clusters. J. Phys.: Conf. Ser. 341, 012029 (2012)

  13. Khlifi, H., Gregorie, J.C.: Low-complexity offline and online clock skew estimation and removal. Int. J. Comput. Telecommun. Netw. 50(11), 1872–1884 (2006)

    Article  MATH  Google Scholar 

  14. Shameli-Sendi, A., Cheriet, M., Hamou-Lhadj, A.: Taxonomy of intrusion risk assessment and response system. Comput. Secur. 45, 1–16 (2014)

    Article  Google Scholar 

  15. Domingos, P., Hulten, G.: Mining high-speed data streams. In: Proceedings of the Sixth ACM SIGKDD International Conference on Knowledge Discovery and Data Mining, pp. 71–80 (2000)

  16. Mills, D.L.: Computer network time synchronization. In: The Network Time Protocol.CRC Press Inc, Boca Raton (2006)

  17. Veitch, D., Ridoux, J., Korada, S.B.: Robust synchronization of absolute and difference clocks over networks. J. IEEE/ACM Trans. Netw. 17(2), 417–430 (2009)

    Article  Google Scholar 

  18. Ridoux, J., Veitch, D., Broomhead, T.: The case for feed-forward clock synchronization. IEEE/ACM Trans. Netw. 20(1), 231–242 (2012)

    Article  MATH  Google Scholar 

  19. Lamport, L.: Time, clocks, and the ordering of events in a distributed system. Commun. ACM 21(7), 558–565 (1978)

    Article  Google Scholar 

  20. Fidge, C.: Timestamps in message-passing systems that preserve the partial ordering. In: Proceedings of the 11th Australian Computer Science Conference (ACSC’88), pp. 56–66 (1988)

  21. Mattern, F.: Virtual time and global states of distributed systems. Parallel Distrib. Algorithms 1(23), 215–226 (1989)

    MATH  MathSciNet  Google Scholar 

  22. Cristian, F.: Probabilistic clock synchronization. Distrib. Comput. 3(3), 146–158 (1989)

    Article  Google Scholar 

  23. Gusella, R., Zatti, S.: The accuracy of the clock synchronization achieved by TEMPO in Berkeley UNIX 4.3BSD. IEEE Trans. Softw. Eng. 15(7), 847–853 (1989)

    Article  Google Scholar 

  24. Gaber, M., Zaslavsky, A., Krishnaswamy, S.: Mining data streams: a review. SIGMOD Rec. 34(2), 18–26 (2005)

    Article  Google Scholar 

  25. Han, J., Kamber, M.: Data Mining: Concepts and Techniques, 2nd edn. Elsevier, San Francisco (2006)

    Google Scholar 

  26. Zhang, L., Liu, Z., Xia, C.H.: Clock synchronization algorithms for network measurements. In: Proceedings of Twenty-First Annual Joint Conference of the IEEE Computer and Communications Societies, pp. 160–169 (2002)

  27. Choi, J.H., Yoo, C.: One-way delay estimation and its application. In: Computer Communications, pp. 819–828 (2005)

  28. Kim, D., Lee, J.: End-to-end one-way delay estimation using one-way delay variation and round-trip time. In: Proceedings of Qshine (2007)

  29. Lu, W.Z., Gu, W.X., Yu, S.Z.: One-way queuing delay measurement and its application on detecting DDoS attack. J. Netw. Comput. Appl. 32(2), 367–376 (2009)

    Article  Google Scholar 

  30. Aoki, M., Oki, E., Rojas-Cessa, R.: Measurement scheme for one-way delay variation with detection and removal of clock skew. ETRI J. 32(6), 854–862 (2010)

    Article  Google Scholar 

  31. Cola, M., Lucia, G.D., Mazza, D., Patrignani, M., Rimondini, M.: Covert channel for one-way delay measurements. In: Proceedings of 18th Internatonal Conference on Computer Communications and Networks, pp. 1–6 (2009)

  32. Ngamwongwattana, B., Thompson, R.: Measuring one-way delay of VoIP packets without clock synchronization. In: Instrumentation and Measurement Technology Conference, pp. 532–535 (2009)

  33. Kuhn, F., Locher, T., Oshman, R.: Gradient clock synchronization in dynamic networks. Theory Comput. Syst. 49(4), 781–816 (2011)

    Article  MATH  MathSciNet  Google Scholar 

  34. Betti, E., Cesati, M., Gioiosa, R, Piermaria, F.: A global operating system for HPC clusters. In: IEEE International Conference on Cluster Computing and Workshops, pp. 1–10 (2009)

  35. Desnoyers, M., Dagenais, M.: Deploying LTTng on exotic embedded architectures. In: Embedded Linux Conference (2009)

  36. Ellingson, C., Kulpinski, R.: Dissemination of system time. IEEE Trans. Commun. 21(5), 605–624 (1973)

    Article  Google Scholar 

Download references

Acknowledgments

The support of the Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council of Canada (NSERC) and Ericsson Software Research is gratefully acknowledged.

Author information

Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Computer and Software Engineering, École Polytechnique de Montréal, Montréal, Canada

    Masoume Jabbarifar, Michel Dagenais & Alireza Shameli-Sendi

Authors
  1. Masoume Jabbarifar
    View author publications

    You can also search for this author in PubMed Google Scholar

  2. Michel Dagenais
    View author publications

    You can also search for this author in PubMed Google Scholar

  3. Alireza Shameli-Sendi
    View author publications

    You can also search for this author in PubMed Google Scholar

Corresponding author

Correspondence to Masoume Jabbarifar.

Rights and permissions

Reprints and permissions

About this article

Check for updates. Verify currency and authenticity via CrossMark

Cite this article

Jabbarifar, M., Dagenais, M. & Shameli-Sendi, A. Online Incremental Clock Synchronization. J Netw Syst Manage 23, 1034–1066 (2015). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10922-014-9331-7

Download citation

  • Received:

  • Revised:

  • Accepted:

  • Published:

  • Issue Date:

  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10922-014-9331-7

Keywords

Search

Navigation