SME: A New Software Transactional Memory Based Mutual Exclusion Algorithm for Distributed Systems

The utilization of concurrent computing has significantly increased in the last three decades for various commercial and scientific applications. However, concurrent systems often have an astronomically large number of possible executions. These executions may proceed in many different ways depending on scheduling of processes, sequence of inputs, etc. Such non-determinism often leads to gaps or malfunctions in the system design. Thus synchronization of resources became a great issue and programmers had to put huge effort solving this. Transactional memory is one of those measures to solve these inconsistencies. The goal of a transactional memory system is to transparently support the definition of regions of code that are considered in a transaction to maintain the ACID properties of transactions. This paper explores the possibility of designing a STM based mutual exclusion algorithm and compares its performance in terms of time and message complexity. A new STM-based mutual exclusion algorithm known as SME has been proposed and the results have been compared with those due to traditional FAPP algorithm. Besides, the proposed SME implementation is on the ring topology that provides a stable structure suitable for increasing the degree of multiprogramming.