Measuring distributed durations with stable errors
The round-trip duration measurement technique is fundamental in solving many problems in asynchronous distributed systems. In essence, this technique provides the means for reading remote clocks with a known and bounded error. Therefore, it is used as a fundamental building block in several clock synchronization algorithms. In general, the technique can be used to implement duration measurement services, such as that of the timely computing base model. In this paper we propose a new technique for measuring distributed durations that minimizes the measurement error and is able to keep this error almost stable. The new technique can be used to improve the precision of remote clock reading in certain situations. We provide a protocol that implements this new technique and present some evaluation results. The results clearly show that our solution is better than existing ones.