Mutual Exclusion Between Neighboring Nodes in a Tree That Stabilizes Using Read/Write Atomicity

. Our purpose in this paper is to propose a new protocol that can ensure mutual exclusion between neighboring nodes in a tree structured distributed system, i.e., under the given protocol no two neighboring nodes can execute their critical sections concurrently. This protocol can be used to run a serial model self stabilizing algorithm in a distributed environment that accepts as atomic operations only send a message, receive a message an update a state. Unlike the scheme in [1], our protocol does not use time-stamps (which are basically unbounded integers); our algorithm uses only bounded integers (actually, the integers can assume values only 0, 1, 2 and 3) and can be easily implemented. 1 Introduction Because of the popularity of the serial model and the relative ease of its use in designing new self-stabilizing algorithm, it is worthwhile to design lower level self-stabilizing protocols such that an algorithm developed for a serial model can be run in a distributed environment. Th..