Clock Synchronization: Open Problems in Theory and Practice

Clock synchronization is one of the most basic building blocks for many applications in computer science and engineering. The purpose of clock synchronization is to provide the constituent parts of a distributed system with a common notion of time. While the problem of synchronizing clocks in distributed systems has already received considerable attention from researchers and practitioners alike, we believe that there are many fascinating problems that remain unsolved. In this paper, we give a brief overview of previous work in this area, followed by a discussion of open clock synchronization problems in theory and practice.

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