A Token-Based Group Mutual Exclusion Algorithm for Cellular Wireless Networks

Due to the mobility of hosts, limited battery power and processing power of mobile hosts, and the low bandwidth of wireless channels, the existing distributed algorithms designed for the static distributed systems required to be restructured before these can be used in the cellular wireless networks. The group mutual exclusion (GME) problem is an interesting generalization of the classical mutual exclusion problem which deals with two contradictory issues of mutual exclusion and concurrency. In the present paper, we propose a hierarchical token-based algorithm to solve the GME problem in cellular wireless networks. To the best of our knowledge the proposed algorithm is the first GME algorithm for cellular networks. In the proposed algorithm, a resource starved mobile host requires very little data structure and the bulk of the computation is performed at the resource rich base station level.