Fairness is a liveness property desired in certain distributed computing and other situations, where it is desirable that the protocol used be guaranteed to avoid starving any process, and where it also desirable that all processes be accorded the same priority in allowing their accesses to the shared resource. Other such fairness conditions can be stated as well.

The basic notion of fairness is that all processes in a system have the chance to make progress, whatever other processes may be doing at the same time. A distinguishing feature of fairness is eventuality, i.e., the notion that given enough time, a desired good event does happen. In a formal sense, it is possible to think of fairness as a restriction on some infinite behavior specification--that is, a restriction that there is no possible infinite sequence of behavior on a system where the desired good event is not...