This dissertation explores the necessary and sufficient conditions to solve a variant
of the dining philosophers problem. This dining variant is defined by three properties:
wait-freedom, eventual weak exclusion, and eventual bounded fairness. Wait-freedom
guarantees that every correct hungry process eventually enters its critical
section, regardless of process crashes. Eventual weak exclusion guarantees that every
execution has an infinite suffix during which no two live neighbors execute overlapping
critical sections. Eventual bounded fairness guarantees that there exists a
fairness bound k such that every execution has an infinite suffix during which no
correct hungry process is overtaken more than k times by any neighbor. This dining
variant (WF-EBF dining for short) is important for synchronization tasks where eventual
safety (i.e., eventual weak exclusion) is sufficient for correctness (e.g., duty-cycle
scheduling, self-stabilizing daemons, and contention managers).
Unfortunately, it is known that wait-free dining is unsolvable in asynchronous
message-passing systems subject to crash faults. To circumvent this impossibility
result, it is necessary to assume the existence of bounds on timing properties, such
as relative process speeds and message delivery time. As such, it is of interest to
characterize the necessary and sufficient timing assumptions to solve WF-EBF dining.
We focus on implicit timing assumptions, which can be encapsulated by failure detectors. Failure detectors can be viewed as distributed oracles that can be queried
for potentially unreliable information about crash faults. The weakest detector D for
WF-EBF dining means that D is both necessary and sufficient. Necessity means that
every failure detector that solves WF-EBF dining is at least as strong as D. Sufficiency
means that there exists at least one algorithm that solves WF-EBF dining using D.
As such, our research goal is to characterize the weakest failure detector to solve
WF-EBF dining.
We prove that the eventually perfect failure detector 3P is the weakest failure
detector for solving WF-EBF dining. 3P eventually suspects crashed processes permanently,
but may make mistakes by wrongfully suspecting correct processes finitely
many times during any execution. As such, 3P eventually stops suspecting correct
processes.
| Identifer | oai:union.ndltd.org:tamu.edu/oai:repository.tamu.edu:1969.1/ETD-TAMU-2008-12-112 |
| Date | 14 January 2010 |
| Creators | Song, Yantao |
| Contributors | Pike, Scott M. |
| Source Sets | Texas A and M University |
| Language | en_US |
| Detected Language | English |
| Type | Book, Thesis, Electronic Dissertation |
| Format | application/pdf |
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