Distributed Algorithms

Chapter 11 Resource Allocation

In Chapter 10, we considered the mutual exclusion problem, an abstract resource-allocation problem involving access by concurrent users to a single unshareable resource. In this chapter, we generalize the problem to include many resources instead of just one. This generalization is useful for modelling application programs that require several resources for their execution, for example, a printer plus a database plus a network port.

There are more general types of resource-allocation problems than those we consider here. For instance:

1. We do not consider (except in some general definitions and some exercises) the possibility that a user might be willing to accept alternative combinations of resources. For example, ...