Group Mutual Exclusion Algorithms Based on Ticket Orders

Abstract

Group mutual exclusion is an interesting generalization of the mutual exclusion problem. This problem was introduced by Joung, and some algorithms for the problem have been proposed by incorporating mutual exclusion algorithms. Group mutual exclusion occurs naturally in a situation where a resource can be shared by processes of the same group, but not by processes of different groups. It is also called the congenial talking philosophers problem. In this paper we propose three algorithms based on ticket orders for the group mutual exclusion problem in the asynchronous shared memory model. The first algorithm is a simple modification of the Bakery algorithm. It satisfies group mutual exclusion, but does not satisfy lockout freedom. The second and the third algorithms are further modifications from the first one in order to satisfy lockout freedom and to improve the concurrency performance. They use single-writer shared variables, together with two multi-writer shared variables that are never concurrently written. The third algorithm has another desirable property, called smooth admission. By this property, during the period that the resource is occupied by the leader, a process wishing to join the same group as the leader’s group can be granted use of the resource in constant time.