A Universal Self-Stabilizing Mutual Exclusion Algorithm

A distributed system is said to be self-stabilizing if it converges to a correct system state from any initial system state in finite number of steps. Such a self-stabilizing system can be regarded as a fault tolerant system against transient faults since by definition it autonomously returns to a correct system state, no matter how maliciously variables and buffers are rewritten. In this paper, we focus on the case in which the processes may not have unique identifiers and investigate the problem of self-stabilizing mutual exclusion (ss-mutex). In this paper, we give characterization of the class of networks on which a deterministic ss-mutex algorithm exists, and then presents a universal deterministic ss-mutex algorithm that works correctly on any network in this class.