Bounding Lamport’s bakery algorithm

Abstract

Lamport’s Bakery algorithm is among the best known mutual exclusion algorithms. A drawback of Lamport’s algorithm is that it requires unbounded registers for communication among processes. By making a small modification to Lamport’s algorithm, we remove the need for unbounded registers. The main appeal of our algorithm lies in the fact that it overcomes a drawback of a famous algorithm while preserving its elegance.