An Elegant l-exclusion Algorithm for Shared Memory Systems

Recent advancement of embedded systems and growing popularity of Java renew the interest to some classic process coordination problems, such as mutual exclusion problem and its generalization called l-exclusion problem. These are fundamental problems in parallel and distributed processing systems. The l-exclusion problem was introduced by Fischer et al.[9] for shared memory systems and subsequently studied in [6, 10, 2, 3, 4, 12, 1, 11]. In this paper, we present a simple solution to l-exclusion problem and prove its correctness. Our solution is efficient both in time and space.