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Formal Aspects of Computing

, Volume 29, Issue 5, pp 833–852 | Cite as

Tournaments for mutual exclusion: verification and concurrent complexity

  • Wim H. Hesselink
Open Access
Original Article
First Online:

Abstract

Given a mutual exclusion algorithm MXd for \({d \geq 2}\) threads, a mutual exclusion algorithm for \({N > d}\) threads can be built in a tree of degree d with N leaves, with the critical section at the root of the tree. This tournament solution seems obviously correct and efficient. The present note proves the correctness, and formalizes the efficiency in terms of concurrent complexity by means of Bounded Unity. If the tree is balanced, the throughput is logarithmic in N. If moreover MXd satisfies FCFS (first-come first-served), the worst case individual delay of the tournament algorithm is of order N. This is optimal.

Keywords

Mutual exclusion unity Concurrency Shared variables Concurrent complexity 
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Copyright information

© The Author(s) 2017

Open AccessThis article is distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/), which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided you give appropriate credit to the original author(s) and the source, provide a link to the Creative Commons license, and indicate if changes were made.

Authors and Affiliations

  1. 1.Johann Bernoulli Institute for Mathematics and Computer Science University of GroningenGroningenThe Netherlands

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