An approach to controlling the order of events in a distributed system

The present article considers the problem of controlling actual temporal order among a number of events in a distributed system based on a common time base. This problem occurs in distributed industrial applications such as environment monitoring and manufacturing. We propose a token-passing algorithm which correctly orders events based on their actual happening time. It is shown that the algorithm is rollback-free, and analytical results show that it also guarantees bounded communication delay under certain assumptions