Abstract—A shared resource synchronization amongst many processes trying to acquire it is a major source of complexity in uniprocessor and multiprocessor systems. The common way of dealing with such complexity is to exclusively acquire the shared resource by a lock, work on it and then let go after the resource is no longer needed. A reader-writer lock paradigm is unique in a way that it allows multiple readers to share the resources amongst them as readers are not changing the state of the shared resource or allow a single writer exclusively to write into/or change the shared resource state from A–B.
A reader-writer problem is a challenging topic and deserves its own identity. There are many reader-writer algorithms that try to solve and improve the efficiency of this synchronization. With great improvements in computer hardware and subsequently the synchronization methods in the last 2 decades, we attempt to bring all reader-writer locks together. The paper would first examine a general lock and later move on to different kinds of reader-writer locks in the literature to the best of our knowledge. 

Index Terms—exclusively, lock, processes, reader, synchronization, writer

Cite: Bharath Reddy and Richard Fields, "Techniques for Reader-Writer Lock Synchronization," International Journal of Electronics and Electrical Engineering, Vol. 8, No. 4, pp. 63-73, December 2020. doi: 10.18178/ijeee.8.4.63-73