A generalized grid quorum strategy for k-mutual exclusion in distributed systems

In the problem of k-mutual exclusion, concurrent access to shared resource or the critical section (CS) must be synchronized such that at any time at most k processes can access the CS. In this paper, we propose a generalized grid quorum strategy for k-mutual exclusion, which imposes a logical grid structure on the network. The quorum size is always equal to [(M + 1)/(k + 1)] x [(N + 1)/2], where M is the number of rows and N is the number of columns in a grid. From our performance study, we show that the generalized grid quorum strategy can provide a good performance in terms of the quorum size and the availability. (C) 2001 Elsevier Science B.V. All rights reserved.