Document Type
Technical Report
Publication Date
4-17-2008
Technical Report Number
TR2008-618
Abstract
Mutual exclusion is not solvable in an asynchronous message-passing system where processes are subject to crash failures. Delporte-Gallet et. al. determined the weakest failure detector to solve this problem when a majority of processes are correct. Here we identify the weakest failure detector to solve mutual exclusion in any environment, i.e., regardless of the number of faulty processes. We also show a relation between mutual exclusion and consensus, arguably the two most fundamental problems in distributed computing. Specifically, we show that a failure detector that solves mutual exclusion is sufficient to solve non-uniform consensus but not necessarily uniform consensus.
Dartmouth Digital Commons Citation
Bhatt, Vibhor; Christman, Nicholas; and Jayanti, Prasad, "The Weakest Failure Detector to Solve Mutual Exclusion" (2008). Computer Science Technical Report TR2008-618. https://digitalcommons.dartmouth.edu/cs_tr/313