On Implementation of Logical Time in Distributed Systems Operating Over a Wireless IP Network

Tracking the causality between activities in distinct physical locations plays a critical role in monitoring, analyzing and debugging the behavior of distributed systems. Yet the understanding of a distributed execution, in particular, detecting causal relation or concurrency (i.e., causal independence) between various local events, and accounting for the associated nondeterminism, presents a formidable engineering challenge. The task becomes notoriously difficult as the complexity of the underlying communication network and the number of potentially interacting sites grows.