Threshold Counters with Increments and Decrements

A threshold counter is a shared data structure that assumes integer values It provides two operations Increment changes the current counter value from v to v while Read returns the value bv wc where v is the current counter value and w is a xed constant Thus the Read operation returns the approximate value of the counter to within the constant w Threshold counters have many potential uses including software barrier synchronization Threshold networks are a class of distributed data structures that can be used to construct highly concurrent low contention implementations of shared threshold counters In this paper we give the rst proof that any threshold network construction of a threshold counter can be extended to support a Decrement operation that changes the counter value from v to v