Using ordered and atomic multicast for distributed deadlock prevention

Abstract

This paper presents a new mechanism for preventing resource deadlock in a distributed system. The mechanism uses the ordered and atomic multicast (OAM) services to prevent processes that concurrently share resources from deadlocks. OAM provides communication services which deliver messages to their destinations with the guarantees of ordering and atomicity. The paper shows that in a number of situations, OAM is a good alternative to the existing deadlock prevention techniques.