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Waiting in concurrent algorithms

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Abstract

Between the two extremes, lock-based algorithms, which involve “a lot of waiting”, and wait-free algorithms, which are “free of locking and waiting”, there is an interesting spectrum of different levels of waiting. This unexplored spectrum is formally defined and its properties are investigated. New progress conditions, called k-waiting, for \(k\ge 0\), which are intended to capture the “amount of waiting” of processes in asynchronous concurrent algorithms, are introduced. To illustrate the utility of the new conditions, they are used to derive new lower and upper bounds, and impossibility results for well-known basic problems such as consensus, election, renaming and mutual exclusion. Furthermore, the relation between waiting and fairness is explored.

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Notes

  1. In the case of a beginning process, “its operation” means the operation that the process is about to start executing.

  2. A set of processes P is maximal with respect to property \(\phi \), if (1) P satisfies \(\phi \), and (2) there is no set Q, such that \(P \subset Q\) and Q satisfies \(\phi \).

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. The Interdisciplinary Center, P.O.Box 167, 46150, Herzliya, Israel

    Gadi Taubenfeld

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  1. Gadi Taubenfeld
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Correspondence to Gadi Taubenfeld.

Additional information

A preliminary version of the results presented in this paper, appeared in 4th international conference on networked systems (NETYS 2016), Marrakech, Morocco, May 2016 [25].

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Taubenfeld, G. Waiting in concurrent algorithms. Computing 101, 39–57 (2019). https://doi.org/10.1007/s00607-018-0618-5

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s00607-018-0618-5

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