Maxwait: A Generalized Mechanism for Distributed Time-Sensitive Systems

Fuente: arXiv
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Auteurs principaux: Paladino, Francesco, Li, Shulu, Lee, Edward A.
Format: Preprint
Publié: 2026
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author Paladino, Francesco
Li, Shulu
Lee, Edward A.
author_facet Paladino, Francesco
Li, Shulu
Lee, Edward A.
contents Distributed time-sensitive systems must balance timing requirements (availability) and consistency in the presence of communication delays and synchronization uncertainty. This paper presents maxwait, a simple coordination mechanism with surprising generality that makes these tradeoffs explicit and configurable. We demonstrate that this mechanism subsumes classical distributed system methods such as PTIDES, Chandy-and-Misra with or without null messages, Jefferson's Time-Warp, and Lamport's time-based fault detection, while enabling real-time behavior in distributed cyber-physical applications. The mechanism can also realize many commonly used distributed system patterns, including logical execution time (LET), publish and subscribe, actors, conflict-free replicated data types (CRDTs), and remote procedure calls with futures. More importantly, it adds to these mechanisms better control over timing, bounded time fault detection, and the option of making them more deterministic, all within a single semantic framework. Implemented as an extension of the Lingua Franca coordination language, maxwait enforces logical-time consistency when communication latencies are bounded and provides structured fault handling when bounds are violated.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2601_21146
institution arXiv
publishDate 2026
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Maxwait: A Generalized Mechanism for Distributed Time-Sensitive Systems
Paladino, Francesco
Li, Shulu
Lee, Edward A.
Distributed, Parallel, and Cluster Computing
Computation and Language
Distributed time-sensitive systems must balance timing requirements (availability) and consistency in the presence of communication delays and synchronization uncertainty. This paper presents maxwait, a simple coordination mechanism with surprising generality that makes these tradeoffs explicit and configurable. We demonstrate that this mechanism subsumes classical distributed system methods such as PTIDES, Chandy-and-Misra with or without null messages, Jefferson's Time-Warp, and Lamport's time-based fault detection, while enabling real-time behavior in distributed cyber-physical applications. The mechanism can also realize many commonly used distributed system patterns, including logical execution time (LET), publish and subscribe, actors, conflict-free replicated data types (CRDTs), and remote procedure calls with futures. More importantly, it adds to these mechanisms better control over timing, bounded time fault detection, and the option of making them more deterministic, all within a single semantic framework. Implemented as an extension of the Lingua Franca coordination language, maxwait enforces logical-time consistency when communication latencies are bounded and provides structured fault handling when bounds are violated.
title Maxwait: A Generalized Mechanism for Distributed Time-Sensitive Systems
topic Distributed, Parallel, and Cluster Computing
Computation and Language
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2601.21146