A Distributed Mutual Exclusion Algorithm for Mobile Ad Hoc Networks

We propose a distributed mutual exclusion algorithm for mobile ad hoc networks. This algorithm requires a ring of cluster coordinators as the underlying topology. The topology is built by first providing clusters of mobile nodes in the first step and then forming a backbone consisting of the cluster heads in a ring as the second step. The modified version of the Ricart-Agrawala Algorithm on top of this topology provides analytically and experimentally an order of decrease in message complexity with respect to the original algorithm. We analyze the algorithm, provide performance results of the implementation, discuss the fault tolerance and the other algorithmic extensions, and show that this architecture can be used for other middleware functions in mobile networks.