Evaluating and Optimizing Stabilizing Dining Philosophers

Abstract

We study theoretical and practical aspects of five of the most well-known self-stabilizing dining philosophers algorithms. We theoretically prove that three of them are incorrect. For practical evaluation, we simulate all algorithms and evaluate their fault-tolerance, latency and throughput of critical section access. We present a new combined algorithm that achieves the best throughput of the two remaining correct algorithms by determining the system load and switching between these basic algorithms. We prove the combined algorithm correct, simulate it and study its performance characteristics.