Fault-tolerant algorithms for fair interprocess synchronization

The implementation of nondeterministic pairwise synchronous communication among a set of asynchronous processes is modeled as the binary interaction problem. The paper describes an algorithm for this problem that satisfies a strong fairness property that guarantees freedom from process starvation. This is the first algorithm for binary interactions with strong fairness whose message cost and response time are independent of the total number of processes in the system. The paper also describes how the fair algorithm may be extended to tolerate detectable fail-stop failures. Finally, we show how any solution to the dining philosophers problem can be embedded to design a fair algorithm for binary interactions. In particular, this embedding is used to derive a fair algorithm that can cope with undetectable fail-stop failures.<
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