Summary: A Time Complexity Lower Bound for Adaptive Mutual
Exclusion #
Yong­Jik Kim
Tmax Soft Research Center
272­6 Seohyeon­dong, Seongnam­si
Gyeonggi­do, Korea 463­824
Email: jick@tmax.co.kr
James H. Anderson
Department of Computer Science
University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill
Chapel Hill, NC 27599­3175
Email: anderson@cs.unc.edu
September 2005
Abstract
We consider the time complexity of adaptive mutual exclusion algorithms, where ``time'' is measured by
counting the number of remote memory references required per critical­section access. We establish a lower
bound that precludes a deterministic algorithm with O(log k) time complexity (in fact, any deterministic
o(k) algorithm), where k is ``point contention.''
# Work supported by NSF grants CCR 9732916, CCR 9972211, CCR 9988327, ITR 0082866, and CCR 0208289. This work
was presented in preliminary form at the 15th International Symposium on Distributed Computing [13], where it received the best

Source: Anderson, James - Department of Computer Science, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill

Collections: Computer Technologies and Information Sciences