The Effect of Forgetting on the Performance of a Synchronizer.

We study variants of the \(\alpha \)-synchronizer by Awerbuch (J. ACM, 1985) within a distributed message passing system with probabilistic message loss. The purpose of synchronizers is to maintain a virtual (discrete) round structure. Their idea essentially is to let processes continuously exchange round numbers and to allow a process to proceed to the next round only after it has witnessed that all processes have already started its own current round.