A Quorum Based Group k-Mutual Exclusion Algorithm for Open Distributed Environments

摘要

This paper presents a quorum-based group k-mutual exclusion algorithm for open distributed computing systems that can evolve their behavior based on membership changes in the environment. The algorithm consists of two main layers; the quorum-consensus and quorum-reconfiguration. The quorum consensus layer is used to handle requests from and to the application layer, and it directly adopts a proposed k-coterie based algorithm of the group k-mutual exclusion in the static environments without any change to its protocol. Thus, the message complexity and quorum availability are the same as in the static environments. The quorum reconfiguration reconstructs information structure of the k-coterie by simply implementing the properties of two quorum input operations called coterie-join and coterie-cross. The reconfiguration layer is simple to use and has a great ability to complete any operation during reconfiguration powerfully thus system does not enter the halt state.