Global Synchronization and Consensus Using Beeps in a Fault-Prone Multiple Access Channel

Global synchronization is an important prerequisite to many distributed tasks. Communication between processors proceeds in synchronous rounds. Processors are woken up in possibly different rounds. The clock of each processor starts in its wakeup round showing local round 0, and ticks once per round, incrementing the value of the local clock by one. The global round 0, unknown to processors, is the wakeup round of the earliest processor. Global synchronization (or establishing a global clock) means that each processor chooses a local clock round such that their chosen rounds all correspond to the same global round t.