Coterie join operation and tree structured k-coteries

The coterie join operation proposed by Neilsen and Mizuno produces, from a k-coterie and a coterie, a new k-coterie. For the coterie join operation, t his paper first shows 1) a necessary and sufficient condition to produce a nondominated k-coterie (more accurately, a nondominated k-semicoterie satis fying Nonintersection Property) and 2) a sufficient condition to produce a k-coterie with higher availability. By recursively applying the coterie joi n operation in such a way that the above conditions hold, we define nondomi nated k-coteries, called tree structured k-coteries, the availabilities of which are thus expected to be very high. This paper then proposes a new k-m utual exclusion algorithm that effectively uses a tree structured k-coterie , by extending Agrawal and El Abbadi's tree algorithm. The number of messag es necessary for k processes obeying the algorithm to simultaneously enter the critical section is approximately bounded by klog(n/k) in the best case , where n is the number of processes in the system.