A distributed solution for resources allocation to overlapping groups

The distributed resource allocation problem is a well known fundamental problem in distributed systems. Many solutions which avoid the deadlock and starvation have been developed. With the progress of computer networks, however, distributed cooperative group activities in a network environment have been increasing, so that several groups may compete for some resources in the network environment and deadlock among groups and starvation of a group may happen. Since previous allocation models are mainly for representation of competition for resources among processes, they cannot reflect clearly the competition for resources among groups of processes. Moreover, though the previous solutions to the distributed resource allocation problem can avoid the deadlock and starvation, they cannot deal with the deadlock among groups and starvation of a group. The authors present a new model which explicitly describes the competition for resources among process groups which may share common processes, and a definition of “Distributed Allocation of Resources to process Group” (DARG) under the model. A solution to DARG is also proposed by extending an acyclic graph approach to the dining philosopher problem. Our solution allocates resources to groups of processes with deadlock among groups and starvation of a group never happening. In addition, our solution guarantees that more than one group works mutually exclusively if a common process belongs to these groups