Efficient Construction of Global Time in SoCs despite Arbitrary Faults

Abstract—In this paper, we show how to build synchronized clocks of arbitrary size atop of existing small-sized clocks, despite arbitrary faults. Our solution is both self-stabilizing and Byzantine fault-tolerant, and needs merely single-bit channels. It involves a reduction to Byzantine fault-tolerant consensus, which allows different consensus algorithms to be plugged in for matching the actual clock sizes and resilience requirements best. We demonstrate the practicability of our approach by means of an FPGA implementation and its experimental evaluation. To also address the cases where deterministic algorithms hit fundamental limits, we provide a novel randomized self-stabilizing Byzantine consensus algorithm that works very well also in these settings, along with its correctness proof and stabilization time analysis. I