Tight space self-stabilizing uniform l-mutual exclusion

A self-stabilizing algorithm, regardless of the initial system state, converges in finite time to a set of states that satisfy a legitimacy predicate without the need for explicit exception handler of backward recovery. The l-mutual exclusion is a generalization of the fundamental problem of mutual exclusion: the system has to guarantee the fair sharing of a resource that can be used by l processors simultaneously. We present a space efficient solution to the l-mutual exclusion problem that performs on uniform unidirectional ring networks and that is self-stabilizing. Our solution improves the space complexity of previously known approaches by a factor of min(n/sup 2//spl times/log(n), 1/l/spl times/log/sup l-1/ (n)), while retaining none of their drawbacks in terms of system hypothesis (we support unfair scheduler and ensure strong correctness) or specification verification (we guarantee high level 2-mutual exclusion). When l is fixed, the space complexity at each node is constant in average, making our approach suitable for scalable systems.