Electing a leader in a synchronous ring
Journal of the ACM (JACM)
Journal of Parallel and Distributed Computing
A locking protocol for resource coordination in distributed databases
ACM Transactions on Database Systems (TODS)
On the Performance and Feasibility of Multicast Core Selection Heuristics
IC3N '98 Proceedings of the International Conference on Computer Communications and Networks
Core selection methods for multicast routing
ICCCN '95 Proceedings of the 4th International Conference on Computer Communications and Networks
Elections in a Distributed Computing System
IEEE Transactions on Computers
Implementing Fault-Tolerant Distributed Objects
IEEE Transactions on Software Engineering
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In this work, we place a long-established distributed computing problem in a new context. Specifically, the group leader election problem is studied ''inside the network,'' meaning that participants in the election process are network switches/routers, rather than hosts. In this context, an election protocol can take advantage of certain internal operations of the network, such as the underlying routing protocol, to meet stringent fault-tolerance criteria while minimizing the network traffic overhead. A robust solution to the problem, called the Network Leader Election (NLE) protocol, is proposed. The protocol is designed for use in networks based on link-state routing (LSR). The protocol is robust, for it achieves leadership consensus in the presence of adverse events, such as leader failures and network partitioning. The correctness of the protocol is proved formally. A simulation study reveals that the NLE protocol incurs low overhead in handling leader failures and in-group creation. In addition, it is shown how important network functions, including hierarchical routing, address resolution, and multicast core management, can benefit from the NLE protocol.