A mobile agent enabled fully distributed mutual exclusion algorithm

In this paper, we present a fully distributed algorithm using mobile agents to achieve mutual exclusion in a networking environment. The algorithm is designed within a framework for mobile agent enabled distributed server groups (MADSG), where cooperating mobile agents (CMA) are used to achieve coordination among the servers. When it requests to execute in the critical section (CS), to achieve mutual exclusion, a node dispatches a mobile agent to obtain permissions from other nodes. The agent will travel across the nodes and exchange information with them until it obtains enough permissions to decide its order to enter the CS. The algorithm is based on the well-known Majority Consensus Voting (MCV) scheme but, under heavy demand, an agent needs not to contact a majority number of nodes. We show that the proposed algorithm achieves mutual exclusion and is free from deadlock and starvation. We also present the performance analysis in terms of the number of agent migrations and the synchronization delay.