A space-efficient wait-free algorithm for implementing a shared buffer for real-time multiprocessor systems is presented in this paper. The commonly used method to implement shared buffers in real-time systems is based on mutual exclusion. Mutual exclusion is penalised by blocking that typically leads to difficulties in guaranteeing deadlines in real-time systems. Researchers have introduced nonblocking algorithms and data structures that address the above problems. However, many of the nonblocking algorithms that have appeared in the literature have very high space demands, some of them even unbounded, which makes them unsuitable for real-time systems. In this paper, we look at a simple, elegant and easy-to-implement algorithm that implements a shared buffer but uses unbounded time-stamps, and we show how to bound the time-stamps by using the timing information that is available in many real-time systems. Our analysis and calculations show that the algorithm resulting from our approach is space-efficient. The presented protocol can support an arbitrary number of concurrent read and write operations.
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