A Simulation Study on Distributed Mutual Exclusion

In the problem of mutual exclusion concurrent access to a shared resource using a struc tural program abstraction called a Critical Section CS must be synchronized such that at any time only one process can enter the CS In a distributed system due to the lack of both a shared memory and a global clock and due to unpredictable message delay the design of a distributed mutual exclusion algorithm that is free from deadlock and starvation is much more complex than that in a centralized system Based on di erent assumptions about communication topologies and a widely varying amount of information maintained by each site about other sites several distributed mutual exclusion algorithms have been proposed In this paper we survey and analyze several well known distributed mutual exclusion al gorithms according to their related characteristics We also compare the performance of these algorithms by a simulation study Finally we present a comparative analysis of these algorithms