Vector clock
A vector clock is a data structure used for determining the partial ordering of events in a distributed system and detecting causality violations. Just as in Lamport timestamps, inter-process messages contain the state of the sending process's logical clock. A vector clock of a system of N processes is an array/vector of N logical clocks, one clock per process; a local "largest possible values" copy of the global clock-array is kept in each process. Denote as the vector clock maintained by process i, the clock updates proceed as follows: * Initially all clocks are zero. * Each time a process experiences an internal event, it increments its own logical clock in the vector by one. For instance, upon an event at process i, it updates . * Each time a process sends a message, it increments its own logical clock in the vector by one (as in the bullet above, but not twice for the same event) and then the message piggybacks a copy of its own vector. * Each time a process receives a message, it increments its own logical clock in the vector by one and updates each element in its vector by taking the maximum of the value in its own vector clock and the value in the vector in the received message (for every element). For example, if process Pj receives a message m from Pi, it updates by setting . (Wikipedia).
