Encoded Vector Clock: Using Primes to Characterize Causality in Distributed Systems

The vector clock is a fundamental tool for tracking causality in distributed applications. Unfortunately, it does not scale well to large systems because each process needs to maintain a vector of size n, where n is the total number of processes in the system. To address this problem, we propose the encoding of the vector clock using prime numbers to use a single number to represent vector time. We propose the operations on the encoded vector clock (EVC). We then show how to timestamp global states and how to perform operations on the global states using the EVC. We also discuss scalability issues of the EVC.