Analysis of self-stabilizing clock synchronization by means of stochastic Petri nets

A model for analyzing a FCS (fault-tolerant clock synchronization) system of the type supported by a statistical self-diagnosis is described. Once a self-diagnosis scheme is integrated into an FCS design, the problem of controlling and measuring the system's self-stability arises. A stochastic Petri net (SPN) model is constructed to derive the self-stability measures of such FCS systems. An example is given to demonstrate the entire modeling and analyzing procedure. The mapping from SPN model to Markov model shown in an example can be automated by using an SPN software package. The results show that the SPN model is an excellent tool for obtaining self-stability measures and that several important system features, such as synchronization and parallelism, can be modeled using the SPN method in a much clearer manner than they can be modeled using other available tools