A Performance Evaluation and Critique of Singhal Kshemkalyanis Implementation of Vector Clocks

In distributed systems clocks are used for synchronization, ordering etc. Physical clocks which use materials gradually get out of sync over long periods of time called ”clock drift”. Therefore logical clocks are used instead. Lamports scalar clocks offer a very easy implementation of logical clocks however are not strongly consistent. Vector clocks are strongly consistent, but their implementations have a very big overhead in message transmission. Singhal Kshekalyani offer an implementation of vector clocks where in the message overhead can be decreased by transmitting only the differentials instead of the whole vector. The objective of this work is to test their approach.