Delay-optimal quorum-based mutual exclusion for distributed systems

Quorum-based mutual exclusion algorithms enjoy many advantages such as low message complexity and high failure resiliency. Many algorithms exist to construct quorums that can reduce the message complexity or increase the resiliency to site and communication failures. However, not much work has been done on minimizing the synchronization delay. Because all quorum-based algorithms are Maekawa-type algorithms, they have a high synchronization delay of 2T (T is the average message delay). In this paper, we propose a delay-optimal quorum-based algorithm which reduces the synchronization delay to T and still has a low message complexity.