A generalized grid 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 generalized grid quorum strategy for k-mutual exclusion, which imposes a logical grid structure on the network. The quorum size is always equal to ⌈( M+1)/( k+1)⌉×⌈( N+1)/2⌉, where M is the number of rows and N is the number of columns in a grid. From our performance study, we show that the generalized grid quorum strategy can provide a good performance in terms of the quorum size and the availability.