MAINTAINING THE TIME IN A DISTRIBUTED SYSTEM.

Abstract

To a client of a loosely-coupled distributed system, one of the simplest services is a time service. Usually the client simply requests the time from any subset of the time servers making up the service, and uses the first reply. Issues that need to be considered in other services, such as connection establishment or client authentication, need not be considered in a time service. The simplicity of this interaction, however, misrepresents the complexity of implementing such a service.