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.