I just learned about the dining philosophers problem...

The dining philosophers problem is an interesting one, invented by Dijkstra, and important in multi-threaded programming. I read the Wikipedia article and some others on the subject, and noted that the problem is very similar to what is faced in a wireless communication scenario where several clients needs a way to share the channel.

In communication the problem seem to have been solved in some other ways that in programming. E.g. Cellular systems usually employ a scheduler. 802.11 instead uses CSMA/CA. It is interesting to note that the communication system problem description actually is closes to the original problem formulation by Dijkstra where he considered shared access to a tape recorder system.

It would be very interesting to investigate how the computer science solutions perform in a wireless scenario, and vice versa, how would the wireless (and wired, e.g. Ethernet) solutions perform in concurrent programming scenarios.

I will have to get back on that.