An Efficient Weak Mutual Exclusion Algorithm

Abstract

The Weak Mutual Exclusion (WME) is a recently proposed abstraction which, analogously to classical Distributed Mutual Exclusion (DME), permits to serialize concurrent accesses to a shared resource. Unlike DME, however, the WME abstraction regulates the access to a replicated shared resource and is solvable in the presence of less restrictive synchrony assumptions, i.e. in an asynchronous system augmented with an eventually perfect failure detector. This paper presents an efficient WME algorithm which outperforms previous solutions in terms of both communication latency and message complexity, while relying on minimal synchrony assumptions.