A quorum-based distributed algorithm for group mutual exclusion

The group mutual exclusion problem is a variant of mutual exclusion problem in a sense that only the same group of processes can enter their critical section simultaneously. We propose a quorum-based distributed algorithm for the group mutual exclusion problem in asynchronous message passing distributed systems. The message complexity of our algorithm is O(/spl bsol/Q/spl bsol/) in the best case and O(n/spl bsol/Q/spl bsol/) in the worst case, where /spl bsol/Q/spl bsol/ is a quorum size that the algorithm adopts, and n is the number of processes that make requests for resources.