Extension for a time protocol

[siennathesane]

I am interested in extending iroh-gossip to add low-layer support for a time-synchronization protocol, specifically Huygens from USENIX 2018. This would let the gossip participants synchronize their clocks over time and allow for more stable distributed systems. Is that something of interest to this project?

[b5]

Woah cool! We definitely have interest in clock sync. I've been meaning to use it for syncing MIDI signals for making music over a network connection, but haven't gotten around to it.

To me a clock sync algo would make more sense as a separate protocol. What characteristics of gossip do you want in a clock sync protocol?

[siennathesane]

Well I was thinking about piggy-backing on the gossip protocol itself and then adding a single "GetNetworkTime" API (or something)

The messages are already being sent, we have the cluster connectivity, it would just be adding a single field to the messages being sent (and excluding the timestamp from "has seen before" validations), the SVM, and then a hybrid logical clock for the GetNetworkTime (or whatever) API.

It's less about dedicated protocol and more about "all the hooks are already here so this is an extension." If we can split out the HyParView functionality into it's own package, I can build it there instead as an enabled feature. Right now HyParView just integrated into the iroh-gossip package so it's just easier to do it in-place.

Ultimately the only thing this protocol needs is clustering. If you'd rather not put it here, I can create a separate time protocol crate with HyParView and have it be a dedicated thing.

[groutoutlook]

Hi, I'm very interested in this topic since I'm doing some works related to synchronization over embedded systems.
What do you guys think of statime¹? I found them to be quite related to this work as well.

Footnotes

1. pendulum-project/statime: Implementation of the Precision Time Protocol (PTP) in Rust ↩

[siennathesane]

@groutoutlook this would be an application-level convergence algorithm, not something that ties into outside clocks (beyond the system clock). I think that's out of scope for what I'm proposing.