CS 68191 Masters Seminar / CS 89191 Doctoral Seminar
Spring 2007



Masters Student Presentation

Dining Philosophers with Generic Conflicts

Praveen Danturi



We generalize the classic dining philosophers problem to separate the conflict and communication neighbors of each process. Communication neighbors may directly exchange information while conflict neighbors compete for the access to the exclusive critical section of code. This generalization is motivated by a number of practical problems in distributed systems including problems in wireless sensor networks. We present K-hop dining philosophers (KDP), that solves a restricted version of the generalized problem where the conflict set for each process is limited to its k-hop neighborhood. We then propose how KDP can be extended to handle fully generalized problem and generalized drinking philosophers problem.