Abstract
<title>Abstract</title> <p>This research introduces a heartbeat validation mechanism for distributed edge-computing systems. The solution addresses network challenges including message loss, delays, duplications, and reordering through robust design based on clock-synchronization and hash-functions. The proposed system offers a simplified architecture compared to other systems in the literature, this architecture does not require third party nodes or heavy computation, and is still able to guarantee message authentication and integrity, requiring only clock-synchronization between the nodes. Analysis and test results on the Raspberry Pi 5 show the protocol’s tolerance to message loss, and that it has low computational burden,requiring a total initialization time of no more than 900 ms and as low s 1 MB of storage space at the sender, and negligible initialization and storage requirements at the receiver’s side.</p>