A distributed mutual exclusion algorithm

A distributed algorithm is presented that realizes mutual exclusion among N nodes in a computer network. The algorithm requires at most N message exchanges for one mutual exclusion invocation. Accordingly, the delay to invoke mutual exclusion is smaller than in an algorithm of Ricart and Agrawala, which requires 2*( N - 1) message exchanges per invocation. A drawback of the algorithm is that the sequence numbers contained in the messages are unbounded. It is shown that this problem can be overcome by slightly increasing the number of message exchanges.