Service-Sharing Approach Using a Mutual Exclusion Algorithm for Smart Cashier Systems

Service sharing is an important problem in distributed systems, where it affects wait time and allows for the equal use of services by a group of nodes. Mutual exclusion provides an appropriate sharing technique of a critical section (CS) among nodes by the priority order. The primary condition of mutual exclusion is that one node can only use one CS at any given time. In real life, queues and cashier services have long wait times that do not consider the priority of each node. The work presented in this paper proposed a token-based approach, which is a type of mutual exclusion that is suitable for smart cashier systems. In addition, a Fairness algorithm for priority process (FAPP) is implemented for minimizing wait time, decreasing queue length, and promoting fair CS use. The system performance evaluation based on the experiments performed proves the superiority of the proposed algorithm over the first-in-first-out (FIFO) approach in terms of reducing the waiting time.