Possible and Impossible Self-Stabilizing Digital Clock Synchronization in General Graphs

We study digital clock synchronization for multiprocessor systems, where processors are triggered by a common clock pulse and communicate with others via shared memory. A self-stabilizing digital clock synchronization protocol for systems with a general communication graph is presented. The protocol can commence in an arbitrary non-consistent system state and converges to a legitimate state in which the clocks are synchronized and incremented by one in every subsequent pulse. To enhance the fault-tolerance of our protocol, we allow that during and following convergence processors may stop operating. Crash failures may partition the communication graph into several connected components. Our protocol synchronizes the clocks of the processors in every such connected component. For the case in which faulty processors can exhibit Byzantine behavior, we prove that there is no digital clock synchronization protocol that tolerates even one single faulty processor.