A temporal database contains time-varying data. In a real-time database transactions have deadlines or timing constraints. In this paper we review the substantial research in these two heretofore separate research areas. We first characterize the time domain, then investigate temporal and real-time data models. We evaluate temporal and real-time query languages along several dimensions. Temporal and real-time DBMS implementation is examined. We conclude with a summary of the major accomplishments of the research to date, and list several research questions that should be addressed next. Keywords: object-oriented database, relational databases, query language, temporal data model, time-constrained database, transaction time, user-defined time, valid time 1 Introduction Time is an important aspect of all real-world phenomena. Events occur at specific points in time; objects and the relationships among objects exist over time. The ability to model this temporal dimension of the real worl...

We propose a formal definition for the timed asynchronous distributed system model. We present extensive measurements of actual message and process scheduling delays and hardware clock drifts. These measurements confirm that this model adequately describes current distributed systems such as a network of workstations. We also give an explanation of why practically needed services, such as consensus or leader election, which are not implementable in the time-free model, are implementable in the timed asynchronous system model.

We design a reset subsystem that can be embedded in an arbitrary distributed system in order to allow the system processes to reset the system when necessary. Our design is layered, and comprises three main components: a leader election, a spanning tree construction, and a diffusing computation. Each of these components is self-stabilizing in the following sense. If the coordination between the up processes in the system is ever lost (due to failures or repairs of processes and channels) then each component eventually reaches a state where coordination is regained. This capability makes our reset subsystem very robust: it can tolerate fail-stop failures and repairs of processes and channels even when a reset is in progress. Categories and Subject Descriptors: C.2.4 [Computer Communication Systems]: Distributed Systems--distributed applications, network operating systems ; D.1.3 [Programming Techniques]: Concurrent Programming ; D.4.5 [Operating Systems]: Reliability--verification, fa...

Two aspects of reliability of distributed protocols are a protocol's ability to recover from transient faults and a protocol's ability to function in a dynamic environment. Approaches for both of these aspects have been separately developed, but have drawbacks when applied to an environment that has both transient faults and dynamic changes. This paper introduces definitions and methods for addressing both concerns in the design of systems. A protocol is superstabilizing if it is (i) self-stabilizing, meaning that it is guaranteed to respond to an arbitrary transient fault by eventually satisfying and maintaining a legitimacy predicate, and (ii) it is guaranteed to satisfy a passage predicate at all times when the system undergoes topology changes starting from a legitimate state. The passage predicate is typically a safety property that should hold while the protocol makes progress towards re-establishing legitimacy following a topology change. Specific contributions of the paper inc...

The development of practical, localized algorithms is probably the most needed and most challenging task in wireless ad-hoc sensor networks (WASNs). Localized algorithms are a special type of distributed algorithms where only a subset of nodes in the WASN participate in sensing, communication, and computation. We have developed a generic localized algorithm for solving optimization problems in wireless ad-hoc networks that has five components: (i) data acquisition mechanism, (ii) optimization mechanism, (iii) search expansion rules, (iv) bounding conditions, and (v) termination rules. The main idea is to request and process data only locally and only from nodes who are likely to contribute to rapid formation of the final solution. The approach enables two types of optimization: The first, guarantees the fraction of nodes that are contacted while optimizing for solution quality. The second, provides guarantees on solution quality while minimizing the number of nodes that are contacted and/or amount of communication. This localized optimization approach is applied to two fundamental problems in sensor networks: location discovery and exposure-based coverage. We demonstrate its effectiveness on a number of examples.

Fault tolerance in distributed computing is a wide area with a significant body of literature that is vastly diverse in methodology and terminology. This paper aims at structuring the area and thus guiding readers into this interesting field. We use a formal approach to define important terms like fault, fault tolerance, and redundancy. This leads to four distinct forms of fault tolerance and to two main phases in achieving them: detection and correction. We show that this can help to reveal inherently fundamental structures that contribute to understanding and unifying methods and terminology. By doing this, we survey many existing methodologies and discuss their relations. The underlying system model is the close-to-reality asynchronous message-passing model of distributed computing.

We present a simple extension of the ß-calculus with located actions and channels and with location names as first-class data, which models the notion of locality and failure present in the higher-order, distributed programming language Facile. The interaction between localities and failures distinguishes our approach from previous ones where the notion of locality is considered in isolation. We argue that the combination of these two features leads, at least from the distributed programming viewpoint, to a more natural semantics. We then discuss the translation of this calculus into a standard simply-sorted ß-calculus and show its adequacy with respect to a barbed bisimulation based semantics. In the translation each location is represented by a special process which interacts, by means of a simple protocol, with any process of the original program that wants to access resources depending on that location. We also employ our translation in the verification of a very simple fault-toler...

We address the problem of the impossibility of implementing synchronous fault-tolerant service specifications in asynchronous distributed systems. We introduce a method for weakening a synchronous service specification so that it becomes implementable in "timed" asynchronous systems, that is, asynchronous systems in which processes have access to local hardware clocks. The method (1) adds to a service interface an exception indicator so that a client knows at any time if a server is currently providing its standard "synchronous" semantics or some other specified exceptional semantics, (2) the standard behavior provided when the exception indicator does not signal an exception is "similar" to the original synchronous service behavior, and (3) a server has to provide its standard semantics whenever the underlying communication and process services exhibit "synchronous behavior ". To illustrate our method, we show how the specification of a synchronous datagram service and an internal clock synchronization service can be transformed into a fail-aware service specification. Further illustrations of the usefulness of fail-aware services are provided by describing a railway crossing service and a fail-aware weak group membership service.

We propose a formal definition for the timed asynchronous system model, we describe extensive measurements of actual message and process scheduling delays and hardware clock drifts that confirm that this model adequately describes current distributed systems built from networked workstations, and we give an explanation of why practically needed services, such as consensus or leader election, which are not implementable in the time-free asynchronous system model, are implementable in the timed model. 1 Introduction Depending on whether the underlying communication and process management services make interprocess communication by messages certain or not, distributed systems can be classified as either synchronous or asynchronous [7]. Communication certainty in a synchronous system means that any message sent by a correct process to a correct destination process is received and processed at the destination within a bounded time. This is achieved in practice by 1) using hard real-time s...

The requirements analysis of critical software components often involves a search for hazardous states and failure modes. This paper describes the integration of a forward search for consequences of reaching these forbidden modes with a backward search for contributing causes. Results are reported from two projects in which theintegrated search method was used to analyze the requirements of critical spacecraft software. The search process was found to be successful in identifying some ambiguous, inconsistent, and missing requirements. More importantly, it identi ed four signi cant, unresolved requirements issues involving complex system interfaces and unanticipated dependencies. The results suggest that recent e orts by researchers to integrate forward and backward search have merit