A O(log2 n) fault-tolerant distributed mutual exclusion algorithm based on open-cube structure

A new distributed mutual exclusion algorithm, using a token and based upon an original rooted tree structure, is presented. The rooted tree introduced, named “open-cube”, has noteworthy stability and locality properties, allowing the proposed algorithm to achieve good performances and high tolerance to node failures: the worst case message complexity per request is, in the absence of node failures, log₂ n+1 where n is the number of nodes, whereas O(log₂n) extra messages in the average are necessary to tolerate each node failure. This algorithm is a particular instance of a general scheme for token and tree-based distributed mutual exclusion algorithms, previously presented in part by the authors; consequently, its safety and liveness properties are inherited from the general one