A Fair Distributed Mutual Exclusion Algorithm

ÐThis paper presents a fair decentralized mutual exclusion algorithm for distributed systems in which processes communicate by asynchronous message passing. The algorithm requires between N ÿ 1 and 2…N ÿ 1† messages per critical section access, where N is the number of processes in the system. The exact message complexity can be expressed as a deterministic function of concurrency in the computation. The algorithm does not introduce any other overheads over Lamport's and RicartAgrawala's algorithms, which require 3…N ÿ 1† and 2…N ÿ 1† messages, respectively, per critical section access and are the only other decentralized algorithms that allow mutual exclusion access in the order of the timestamps of requests. Index TermsÐAlgorithm, concurrency, distributed system, fairness, mutual exclusion, synchronization.