Mutual Exclusion Algorithms in the Shared Queue Model

Abstract

Resource sharing for asynchronous processors with mutual exclusion property is a fundamental task in distributed computing. We investigate the problem in a natural setting: for the communications between processors, they only share several queues supporting enqueue and dequeue operations. It is well-known that there is a very simple algorithm using only one queue when the queue also supports the peek operation, but it is still open whether we could implement mutual exclusion distributed system without the peek operation. In this paper, we propose two mutual exclusion starvation-free algorithms for this more restricted setting. The first algorithm is a protocol for arbitrary number of processors which share 2 queues; the second one is a protocol for 2 processors sharing only one queue.

This work was supported in part by the National Basic Research Program of China Grant 2011CBA00300, 2011CBA00301, the National Natural Science Foundation of China Grant 61033001, 61061130540.