A Dynamic Group Mutual Exclusion Algorithm Using Surrogate-Quorums

The group mutual exclusion problem extends the traditional mutual exclusion problem by associating a type with each critical section. In this problem, processes requesting critical sections of the same type can execute their critical sections concurrently. However, processes requesting critical sections of different types must execute their critical sections in a mutually exclusive manner. In this paper, we provide a distributed algorithm for solving the group mutual exclusion problem based on the notion of surrogatequorum. Intuitively, our algorithm uses the quorum that has been successfully locked by a request as a surrogate to service other compatible requests for the same type of critical section. Unlike the existing quorum-based algorithms for group mutual exclusion, our algorithm achieves a low message complexity of O(q), where q is the maximum size of a quorum, while maintaining both synchronization delay and waiting time at two message hops. Moreover, like the existing quorum-...

• Type: Conference
• Year: 2005
• Where: ICDCS
• Authors: Ranganath Atreya, Neeraj Mittal
• Keywords: Critical Section, Distributed And Parallel Computing, Group Mutual Exclusion, ICDCS 2005, Mutual Exclusion Problem