What do you mean by time-stamping

Question

What do you mean by time-stamping? Describe in detail.

Answer 1

This is a method proposed by the Lamport, used to order events in a distributed system devoid of the use of clocks. This scheme is intended to order events comprising of the transmission of messages. Each system 'i' in the network maintains a counter Ci. Each and every time a system transmits a message, it increments its counter by 1 and joins the time-stamp Ti to the message. If a message is received, the receiving system 'j' sets its counter Cj to 1 more than the maximum of its present value and the incoming time-stamp Ti. At each and every site, the ordering of messages is found out by the given rules: For messages x from site i and y from site j, x leads y if one of the given conditions holds....

a) if Ti<Tj or

b) if Ti=Tj and i<j