Preserving Asymmetry by Symmetric Processes and Distributed Fair Conflict Resolution.

摘要

Conflicts arising in distributed systems, as in contentions for shared resources, are resolved either by a central process or by resorting to probabilistic decision making by individual processes or by assigning a static global priority to each process. All known non-probabilistic solutions to the conflict resolution problem are asymmetric in the sense that they distinguish between processes by ordering process ids of by having some processes carry out special functions. We propose an efficient, fair, symmetric solution for this problem: asymmetry is present initially by judicious placement of shared resources and asymmtery is preserved in a fair manner by our solutions. To provide a concrete framework for our discussion of conflict resolution we couch our discussion in terms of a generalization of the classical dining philospher's problem.