The impact of time on the session problem

  • Authors:

  • Injong Rhee;Jennifer L. Welch

  • Affiliations:

  • Department of Computer Science, CB 3175 Sitterson Hall, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, Chapel Hill, N.C.;Department of Computer Science, CB 3175 Sitterson Hall, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, Chapel Hill, N.C.

  • Venue:
  • PODC '92 Proceedings of the eleventh annual ACM symposium on Principles of distributed computing
  • Year:
  • 1992

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Abstract

The session problem is an abstraction of synchronization problems in distributed systems. It has been used as a test-case to demonstrate the differences in the time needed to solve problems in various timing models, for both shared memory (SM) systems [2] and message-passing (MP) systems [4]. In this paper, the session problem continues to be used to compare timing models quantitatively. The session problem is studied in two new timing models, the periodic and sporadic. Both SM and MP systems are considered. In the periodic model, each process takes steps at a constant unknown rate; different processes can have different rates. In the sporadic model, there exists a lower bound but no upper bound one step time, and message delay is bounded. We show upper and lower bounds on the time complexity of the session problem for these models. In addition, upper and lower bounds on running time are presented for the semi-synchronous SM model, closing an open problem from [4]. Our results suggest a hierarchy of various timing models in terms of time complexity for the session problem.