The patent badge is an abbreviated version of the USPTO patent document. The patent badge does contain a link to the full patent document.
The patent badge is an abbreviated version of the USPTO patent document. The patent badge covers the following: Patent number, Date patent was issued, Date patent was filed, Title of the patent, Applicant, Inventor, Assignee, Attorney firm, Primary examiner, Assistant examiner, CPCs, and Abstract. The patent badge does contain a link to the full patent document (in Adobe Acrobat format, aka pdf). To download or print any patent click here.
Patent No.:
Date of Patent:
Mar. 26, 2002
Filed:
Jan. 29, 1999
Kevin Anthony Kwiat, Whitesboro, NY (US);
The United States of America as represented by the Secretary of the Air Force, Washington, DC (US);
Abstract
Apparatus and method to reduce the duration of timeout periods in fault-tolerant distributed computer systems. When nodes execute a task redundantly and communicate their results over a network for further processing, it is customary to calculate timeouts on a worst-case basis, thereby prolonging their duration unnecessarily. By applying Tchebychev's inequality, which holds for any statistical distribution, to adaptively determine the distribution of the arrival times of the results at the point where further processing of those results takes place, the duration of timeouts is reduced. Successively refining the statistical distribution of the arrival times leads to an improved forecast of future arrivals. Thus timeouts are kept to a minimum without compromising the reliability of the system.