Scalability of a distributed real-time resource counter

The authors address the topic of how to meet a real-time constraint as the load on a distributed system increases, without increasing the capacity of the individual processors. The application studied is a real-time resource counter with a probabilistic correctness criterion, and is motivated by the problem of implementing resource management in the telephone network. They introduce a model that combines distributed computing, real-time constraints, probabilistic correctness, and large system size; to the authors´ knowledge, no previous work addresses this combination