Availability evaluation of quorum-based mutual exclusion schemes in general topology networks

The use of quorums is a well-known approach to achieving mutual exclusion i n distributed environments. In this paper, we propose a new availability ev aluation method for quorum-based mutual exclusion schemes in the presence o f failures. Most of the previously proposed methods take neither the topolo gy of systems nor link failures into consideration, and exhaustive state en umeration has been the only approach that can deal with them so far. By inc orporating a notion called Minimal Quorum Spanning Trees, this method can e fficiently evaluate the availability of quorum-based mutual exclusion schem es in general topology networks with unreliable nodes and links. Through ex perimental results, we show the superiority of the proposed method over exh austive state enumeration.