An efficient permission-cum-cluster based distributed mutual exclusion algorithm for mobile adhoc networks

Mutual exclusion (Mutex) is a major coordination problem in distributed systems. To handle Mutex, the corresponding solutions are mainly classified into permission-based, token-based and quorum-based protocols. Mobile Ad-hoc Networks referred as MANETs introduce new obstacles for designing algorithms that help in solving distributed mutual exclusion problem. To our knowledge, few algorithms have been proposed in the literature which follows token-based or permission-based approach. In this paper, we propose an efficient permission-cum-cluster based distributed mutual exclusion algorithm for mobile adhoc networks. The significant motivation for our algorithm is to ensure that every node should transmit the lowest number of effective messages in the underlying network. Moreover, it will lead to reduced communication delay in order to retrieve the required permissions. We observed that the proposed algorithm outperforms the Mobile_RA algorithm in performance parameters such as synchronization delay, response time as well as message complexity. The results have been substantiated by simulation experiments.