Title
On The Mailbox Problem
Abstract
The Mailbox Problem was described and solved by Aguilera, Gafni, and Lamport in [2] with a mailbox algorithm that uses two flag registers that carry 14 values each. An interesting question that they ask is whether leaner solutions exists. In addition to their algorithm, the authors of [2] proved that the mailbox problem cannot be solved with 1 bit flags. In this paper, we show that 2 bit flags suffice by presenting a mailbox algorithm with two bit flags. The space complexity of Aguilera et al. solution is O(n log n) and they conjectured that a solution with space complexity O(log n) exists. Our algorithm proves this conjecture. We also prove that there is no mailbox algorithm with a smaller space complexity.
Year
DOI
Venue
2013
10.1007/978-3-319-14472-6_30
PRINCIPLES OF DISTRIBUTED SYSTEMS, OPODIS 2014
Keywords
DocType
Volume
distributed algorithms, shared memory, synchronization, linearizability
Journal
8878
ISSN
Citations 
PageRank 
0302-9743
1
0.43
References 
Authors
2
2
Name
Order
Citations
PageRank
Uri Abraham15613.91
Gal Amram221.62