BIB-VERSION:: CS-TR-v2.0
ID:: ncstrl.dartmouthcs//TR2008-618
ENTRY:: April 17, 2008
ORGANIZATION:: Dartmouth College, Computer Science
REQUESTED-BY:: prasad@cs.dartmouth.edu
REQUESTED-FOR:: vibhor
REQUESTED-DATE:: Thu Apr 17 14:25:51 EDT 2008
TITLE:: The Weakest Failure Detector to Solve Mutual Exclusion
TYPE:: Technical Report (paper)
REVISION:: 1
AUTHOR:: Bhatt, Vibhor 
AUTHOR:: Christman, Nicholas  
AUTHOR:: Jayanti, Prasad
DATE:: April 2008    
RETRIEVAL:: For a paper copy, email <reports@cs.dartmouth.edu>
RETRIEVAL:: For a paper copy, write to
       Technical Report Librarian
       Department of Computer Science
       Dartmouth College
       6211 Sudikoff Laboratory
       Hanover, NH 03755-3510
       USA
RETRIEVAL:: PDF at http://www.cs.dartmouth.edu/reports/TR2008-618.pdf
ABSTRACT:: 
Mutual exclusion is not solvable in an asynchronous
message-passing system where processes are subject to crash
failures. Delporte-Gallet et. al. determined the weakest
failure detector to solve this problem when a majority of
processes are correct. Here we identify the weakest failure
detector to solve mutual exclusion in any environment, i.e.,
regardless of the number of faulty processes. 
    We also show a relation between mutual exclusion and
consensus, arguably the two most fundamental problems in
distributed computing. Specifically, we show that a failure
detector that solves mutual exclusion is sufficient to solve
non-uniform consensus but not necessarily uniform consensus.
END:: ncstrl.dartmouthcs//TR2008-618