A SIMULATION STUDY ON DISTRIBUTED MUTUAL EXCLUSION

In the problem of mutual exclusion, concurrent access to a shared reso urce using a structural program abstraction called a critical section (CS) must be synchronized such that at any time only one process can e nter the CS. In a distributed system, due to the lack of both a shared memory and a global clock, and due to unpredictable message delay, th e design of a distributed mutual exclusion algorithm that is free from deadlock and starvation is much more complex than that in a centraliz ed system. Based on different assumptions about communication topologi es and a widely varying amount of information maintained by each site about other sites, several distributed mutual exclusion algorithms hav e been proposed. In this paper, we suvrey and analyze several well-kno wn distributed mutual exclusion algorithms according to their related characteristics. We also compare the performance of these algorithms b y a simulation study. Finally, we present a comparative analysis of th ese algorithms. (C) 1996 Academic Press, Inc.