Fault-tolerant Quality-of-service-enabled Distributed Mutual Exclusion for Message-Oriented Middleware

Distributed mutual exclusion is the process of ensuring exclusive access to a shared resource between multiple competing threads of execution in a distributed system. Despite the utility of distributed mutual exclusion, conventional messageoriented middleware generally does not support this feature, so application developers who need it must create their own ad hoc solutions, which are often inefficient and error-prone. This paper provides two contributions to research on distributed mutual exclusion for message-oriented middleware. First, we describe a quality-of-service (QoS)-enabled distributed algorithm called Prioritizable Adaptive Distributed Mutual Exclusion (PADME) that can be implemented in most message-oriented middleware platforms and which provides high critical section throughput, reduced average synchronization delay, fault tolerance, and priority inversion avoidance. Second, we evaluate the performance of PADME and analyze its QoS and critical section throughput in a representative message-oriented middleware environment. Our results show that the rich feature set of the PADME algorithm addresses a range of application QoS requirements and can reduce synchronization delay to a single message transmission.