Coupling coefficients of a distributed execution (Q1208733)

Coupling coefficients of a distributed execution which evaluate the temporal interactions (delays) of a distributed execution between the processes during execution are defined. The coefficients assess the structure of message exchanges rather than the quantity of exchanged information. Furthermore, it is proven that coupling coefficients are compatible with concatenation and fusion operators on distributed system and could be therefore regarded as a reasonable concurrency measure. Coupling coefficients provide a new criterion for comparison of the complexity of distributed algorithms and together with additional measures (as the speed-up), a new interesting tool for the analysis of distributed systems.