A Time-stamp based Solution for Collective Resource Acquisition in a Distributed System

In some distributed systems, resources are leased, usu- ally for a fixed period of time. For instance, a client leases a networkprinter for ten minutes. We consider the fir st step of leasing - acquisition, and extend the concept of the acquisi- tion of a single resource to that of a collection of resources. In such a context, clients must have simultaneous access to all of the requested resources for the lease to be useful. This paper describes designs and implementations for collective acquisition of resources in distributed systems. It begins with the application background of our research, followed by the formalization of the problem. We then in- troduce our algorithm and prove its correctness. Two im- plementations are specified and compared. Evaluation of the performanceof the algorithms is based on the measure- ments of the network overhead caused by the exchange of control messages, and the measurements of the average re- sponse time for the requests. Implementedin Java, our sys- tem makes novel use of multi-cast to enhance performance and uses heart-beat heuristics to achieve fault-resilience. Finally, we propose approaches to optimize the system per- formance exploiting soft global state information.