A new approach of constructing information mutual exclusion in distributed systems

Abstract

We present a decentralized, symmetric mutual exclusion algorithm in a computer network. The proposed algorithm has the same message complexity as that of the Maekawa's O(/spl radic/(N)) mutual exclusion algorithm ( Maekawa, 1985) and can be applied to arbitrary sizes of distributed systems. It is more suitable than Maekawa's when the symmetry of a system is a criticism. In addition, our algorithm has smaller request set size than that of Gupta, Bruell and Ghosh's (1987) mutual exclusion algorithm on a system of size 2/sup n/ for some integer n.