A BINARY FOREST QUORUM STRATEGY FOR K-MUTUAL EXCLUSION IN DISTRIBUTED SYSTEMS

Abstract

In the problem of k-mutual exclusion, concurrent access to shared resource or the critical section (CS) must be synchronized such that at any time at most k processes can access the CS. In this paper, we propose a binary forest quorum strategy. This strategy is based on a logical binary forest structure. The quorum size constructed from the strategy is 2lg2 n 2k in the best case and is ( n 2k +1) in the worst case, where n is the number of nodes in the system. Moreover, the strategy can be fault-tolerant up to (n − 2klg2 n 2k ) node failures in the best case and 2k(lg2 n 2k 1) in the worst case. From our performance analysis, we show that the binary forest quorum strategy can provide a higher availability than k-majority, cohorts, and DIV strategies almost all the time.