This paper reviews the history and development of competition theory, and describes a set of patterns within which the central problems of competition can be understood and tested. It shows that different patterns and mechanisms of competition can lead to different results within the general model of ‘the competitive exclusion principle.’ [The Sd® indicates that this paper has been cited over 1...

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 in...

ÐThe use of quorums is a well-known approach to achieving mutual exclusion in distributed computing systems. This approach works based on a coterie, a special set of node groups where any pair of the node groups shares at least one common node. Each node group in a coterie is called a quorum. Mutual exclusion is ensured by imposing that a node gets consensus from all nodes in at least one of th...

In this lecture we analyze Peterson’s well known two-process criticalsection protocol [3] and prove that the mutual exclusion property holds. Our main aim is to explain two approaches by which the correctness of this protocol can be established. The first is the assertional method of proof which is the standard approach to concurrency. This approach uses the notions of global states, steps and ...

Most weak memory consistency models are incapable of supporting a solution to mutual exclusion using only read and write operations. Processor Consistency–Goodman’s version is an exception. Ahamad et al.[1] showed that Peterson’s mutual exclusion algorithm is correct for PC-G, but Lamport’s bakery algorithm is not. In this paper, we derive a lower bound on the number and type (singleor multi-wr...

Designing efficient and fault-tolerant algorithms for solving the mutual exclusion problem is an important issue in distributed systems. Many algorithms have been proposed in the literature, and they are being broadly classified into two types: token-based and permissionbased [5, 21]. In a token-based algorithm, the system uses a unique token to represent the privilege for the node possessing i...

The performance of a mutual exclusion algorithm is measured by the number of messages exchanged per critical section execution and the delay between successive executions of the critical section. There is a message complexity and synchronization delay trade-oo in mutual exclusion algorithms. Lamport's algorithm and Ricart-Agrawal algorithm both have a synchronization delay of T, but their messa...

Popular public cloud infrastructures tend to feature centralized, mutual exclusion models for distributed resources, such as file systems. The result of using such centralized solutions in the Google File System (GFS), for instance, reduces scalability, increases latency, creates a single point of failure, and tightly couples applications with the underlying services. In addition to these quali...