A queue based mutual exclusion algorithm

Authors:
Alex A. Aravind;Wim H. Hesselink
Affiliations:
University of Northern British Columbia, Computer Science Program, V2N4Z9, Prince George, BC, Canada;University of Groningen, Department of Computing Science, P.O. Box 407, 9700 AK, Groningen, The Netherlands
Venue:
Acta Informatica
Year:
2009

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Proceedings of the 16th Western Canadian Conference on Computing Education

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Abstract

A new elegant and simple algorithm for mutual exclusion of N processes is proposed. It only requires shared variables in a memory model where shared variables need not be accessed atomically. We prove mutual exclusion by reformulating the algorithm as a transition system (automaton), and applying simulation of automata. The proof has been verified with the higher-order interactive theorem prover PVS. Under an additional atomicity assumption, the algorithm is starvation free, and we conjecture that no competing process is passed by any other process more than once. This conjecture was verified by model checking for systems with at most five processes.