Mean time offset protocol for cluster of auction servers over TCP/IP network

The diffusion of electronic commerce in society is already accepted. Real time application like auction, stock broker, needs a robust system. Using a single server does not guarantee, how strong the hardware and operating system are, the immunity to active or passive adversary. To minimize the single point of failure, cluster of servers are commonly replaced by a single server. In the case of auction protocol using secret sharing scheme, the time of opening and closing of session and synchronization of server message passing are very crucial. But the physically separated servers over TCP/IP network and the drift of clock for each server, make it challenging to have a single clock. TCP/IP was designed to provide the best-effort service. This puts the designer to difficulty in providing a real-time service solution over TCP/IP. In this paper we propose a protocol to calculate mean time offset of a set of servers with minimal chance of error introduced by the unpredictable time delay due to TCP/IP network.