Simple Deadlock Detection for the And-Communication Model

The advent of multicore architectures is a good incentive to revisit base synchronization mechanisms. Among them, the AND communication model is particularly attractive. This communication model provides the processes with a receive operation denoted receive (DS) where DS is a dynamically defined set of processes (DS stands for "dependency set"). The receive operation blocks the invoking process until it has received a message from each process appearing in the dynamically defined set DS. When this occurs, the invoking process consumes these messages and continues its execution. While it simplifies concurrent programming, this high-level communication operation is deadlock-prone. This paper presents a very simple algorithm which allows to detect on the fly communication deadlock in the AND communication model.