The information structure of distributed mutual exclusion algorithms

Abstract

The concept of an information structure is introduced as a unifying principle behind several of the numerous algorithms that have been proposed for the distributed mutual exclusion problem. This approach allows the development of a generalized mutual exclusion algorithm that accepts a particular information structure at initialization and realizes both known and new algorithms as special cases. Two simple performance metrics of a realized algorithm can be obtained directly from the information structure. A new failure recovery mechanism called local recovery, which requires no coordination between nodes and no additional messages beyond that needed for failure detection, is introduced.