The Weak Mutual Exclusion problem

In this paper we define the Weak Mutual Exclusion (WME) problem. Analogously to classical Distributed Mutual Exclusion (DME), WME serializes the accesses to a shared resource. Differently from DME, however, the WME abstraction regulates the access to a replicated shared resource, whose copies are locally maintained by every participating process. Also, in WME, processes suspected to have crashed are possibly ejected from the critical section We prove that, unlike DME, WME is solvable in a partially synchronous model, i.e. a system where the bounds on communication latency and on relative process speeds are not known in advance, or are known but only hold after an unknown time. Finally we demonstrate that ♦P is the weakest failure detector for solving WME, and present an algorithm that solves WME using ♦P with a majority of correct processes.

• Type: Conference
• Year: 2009
• Where: IPPS
• Authors: Paolo Romano, Luís Rodrigues, Nuno Carvalho
• Keywords: Distributed And Parallel Computing, IPPS 2009, Mutual Exclusion, Shared Resource, WME Abstraction