A new voting-based mutual exclusion algorithm for distributed systems

Concurrency control for a distributed system had been always challenging and is getting even more critical with the increasing sophistication of such systems. There are efficient approaches reported in the existing literature that selects one candidate process from many for allowing it to enter its critical section (CS) on the basis of the number of votes received by the processes. A simple principle that a process that gets majority of the total number of votes is only to be allowed for CS ensures safety for such an algorithm as no two processes can earn majority of the total number of polls. However, this may lead to a live-lock situation where no single process reaches the magic number of majority votes. In this paper, a new voting-based algorithm has been proposed to select a process from all the candidates for CS. The proposed algorithm helps increasing the availability of the distributed system.