A HIGHLY CONCURRENT GROUP MUTUAL l-EXCLUSION ALGORITHM
Abstract
The asynchronous group mutual exclusion (GME) problem [5] is a generalization of the (ordinary) mutual exclusion problem. Each process requests a forum. When a process is in the critical section (CS), we say its forum is held. The GME problem (i) allows at most one forum to be held at any time and, (ii) when a forum is held, encourages any number of processes requesting that forum to participate in that forum, that is, to be in the CS simultaneously. An extension of this problem, called the group mutual l-exclusion with multiple forum requests (GMLE-M) problem [8], allows each process to request multiple forums and up to l forums to be held simultaneously. In this paper, we give a simple GMLE-M algorithm that facilitates a highly concurrent participation of processes in forums. The algorithm uses a new technique, called automatic joining, that enables processes to enter the CS directly when their forums are being held. This technique can be used in other extensions of the GME problem also, to increase concurrency.
References
S. Cantarell , Group mutual exclusion in token rings, Proceedings of the 8th International Colloquium On Structural Information and Communication Complexity (SIROCCO'01) (2001) pp. 61–75. Google ScholarS. Cantarell , Token based group mutual exclusion for asynchronous rings, Proceedings of the 21st International Conference On Distributed Computing Systems (ICDCS'01) (2001) pp. 691–694. Google ScholarM. Fischer , Resource allocation with immunity to process failure, Proceedings of the Twentieth Annual IEEE Symposium on Foundations of Computer Science (1979) pp. 78–92. Google ScholarVassos Hadzilacos , A note on group mutual exclusion, Proceedings of the Twentieth Annual ACM Symposium on Principles of Distributed Computing (2001) pp. 100–106. Google ScholarYuh-Jzer Joung , Asynchronous group mutual exclusion, Proceedings of the Seventeenth Annual ACM Symposium on Principles of Distributed Computing (1998) pp. 51–60. Google ScholarP. Keane and M. Moir , A simple local-spin group mutual exclusion algorithm, Proceedings of the Eighteenth Annual ACM Symposium on Principles of Distributed Computing (1999) pp. 23–32. Google Scholar- Information Processing Letters 12(3), 115 (1981), DOI: 10.1016/0020-0190(81)90106-X. Crossref, ISI, Google Scholar
- Information Processing Letters 85, 79 (2003), DOI: 10.1016/S0020-0190(02)00355-1. Crossref, ISI, Google Scholar


