Symmetric Tokens based Group Mutual Exclusion

Abstract

The group mutual exclusion (GME) problem is a generalization of the mutual exclusion problem. The problem is fundamental to parallel and distributed processing, as it is inherent in several applications in the modern multicore-integrated cloud era of the distributed computing world. This paper proposes a First-Come-First-Served (FCFS) GME algorithm that only uses atomic read/write operations for n threads. The proposed algorithm has three key features: (i) its simplicity; (ii) it has complexity in both space (shared variable requirement) and time (remote memory references (RMR)) in cache coherent (CC) models; and (ii) it settles the open problem posed in 2001.