A self-stabilizing token-based k-out-of-l exclusion algorithm

Abstract

In this paper, we present the first self-stabilizing solution to the k out of l exclusion problem [14] on a ring. The k out of l exclusion problem is a generalization of the well-known mutual exclusion problem—there are l units of the shared resources, any process can request some number k (1 ≤ k ≤ l) of units of the shared resources, and no resource unit is allocated to more than one process at one time. The space requirement of the proposed algorithm is independent of l for all processors except a special processor, called Root. The stabilization time of the algorithm is only 5n, where n is the size of the ring.