A number of solutions have been proposed for the problem of mutual exclusion in distributed systems. Some of these approaches have since been extended to a prioritized environment suitable for real-time applications but impose a higher message passing overhead than our approach. We present a new protocol for prioritized mutual exclusion in a distributed environment. Our approach uses a token-based model working on a logical tree structure, which is dynamically modified. In addition, we utilize a set of local queues whose union would resemble a single global queue. Furthermore, our algorithm is designed for out-of-order message delivery, handles messages asynchronously and supports multiple requests from one node for multi-threaded nodes. The prioritized algorithm has an average overhead of Ologn messages per request for mutual exclusion with a worst-case overhead of On, where n represents the number of nodes in the system. Thus, our prioritized algorithm matches the message complexity...