The wandering token: Congestion avoidance of a shared resource

In a distributed system where scalability is an issue, like in a GRID [5], the problem of enforcing mutual exclusion often arises in a soft form: the infrequent failure of the mutual exclusion predicate is tolerated, without compromising the consistent operation of the overall system. For instance this occurs when the operation subject to mutual exclusion requires massive use of a shared resource. We introduce a scalable soft mutual exclusion algorithm, based on token passing: one distinguished feature of our algorithm is that instead of introducing an overlay topology we adopt a random walk approach. The consistency of our proposal is evaluated by simulation, and we exemplify its use in the

• Type: Journal
• Year: 2010
• Where: FGCS
• Authors: Augusto Ciuffoletti
• Keywords: Distributed System, FGCS 2010, Mutual Exclusion, Soft Mutual Exclusion