A new method for constructing efficient local coteries

Distributed resource allocation is a fundamental problem in the development of distributed systems. Solutions for the problem are required to guarantee the mutual exclusive use of a resource, and avoid deadlock and starvation. Coteries are an efficient communication structure for solving mutual exclusion problem which is a special case of the distributed resource allocation problem. An extension of coterie called local coterie was proposed, to solve the distributed resource allocation problem, in a previous research. However, the method for constructing a local coterie proposed in the previous research is not so effective to construct efficient and robust local coteries. We propose a new method for constructing a local coterie that is more efficient due to the smaller size of a quorum and more robust to network failures due to bigger number of quorums than existing ones. Then, we show an algorithm using a local coterie to solve the distributed resource allocation problem. The algorithm guarantees the mutual exclusive access to a resource, deadlock-free, and starvation-free. Moreover, we discuss the message complexity of the algorithm.