Time and State in Asynchronous Distributed Systems
Vijay K. Garg, Neeraj Mittal · Wiley Encyclopedia of Computer Science and Engineering · 2008
Abstract We discuss two fundamental problems that arise in distributed systems: first, how to determine the order in which various events were executed, and second, how to obtain a consistent view of the system. To address the first problem, we describe different schemes that implement an abstract notion of time and can be used to order events in a distributed system. To address the second problem, we discuss ways to obtain a consistent state of the system possibly satisfying certain desirable property.