Efficient mutual exclusion in peer-to-peer systems

Due to the recent surge in the area of grid computing, there is an urgency to find efficient ways of protecting consistent and concurrent access to shared resources. Traditional peer-to-peer (P2P) applications such as Kazaa and Gnutella have been primarily used for sharing read-only files (such as mpegs and mp3s). This paper introduces two novel protocols, the End-to-End and Non End-to-End, for achieving mutual exclusion efficiently in dynamic P2P systems. The protocols are layered atop a distributed hash table (DHT), making them scalable and fault-tolerant. The burden of controlling access to the critical section is also evenly distributed among all the nodes in the network, making the protocols more distributed and easily adaptable to growing networks. Since the protocols are designed independent of any specific DHT implementation, they can be incorporated with any generic P2P DHT, depending on the application requirements. We present experiments comparing our implementations with existing mutual exclusion algorithms. The significant reduction in overall message overhead and better load-balancing mechanisms makes the proposed protocols very attractive in being used for current and future P2P and grid applications.