Design and analysis of dynamic leader election protocols in broadcast networks

  • Authors:

  • Jacob Brunekreef;Joost-Pieter Katoen;Ron Koymans;Sjouke Mauw

  • Affiliations:

  • Programming Research Group, University of Amsterdam, Kruislaan 403, 1098 SJ Amsterdam, The Netherlands;Department of Computing Science, University of Twente, P.O. Box 217, 7500 AE Enschede, The Netherlands;Philips Research Laboratories, Prof. Holstlaan 4, 5656 AA Eindhoven, The Netherlands;Department of Mathematics and Computing Science, Eindhoven University of Technology, P.O. Box 513, 5600 MB Eindhoven, The Netherlands

  • Venue:
  • Distributed Computing
  • Year:
  • 1996

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Abstract

The well-known problem of leader election in distributed systems is considered in a dynamic context where processes may participate and crash spontaneously. Processes communicate by means of buffered broadcasting as opposed to usual point-to-point communication. In this paper we design a leader election protocol in such a dynamic context. As the problem at hand is considerably complex we develop the protocol in three steps. In the initial design processes are considered to be perfect and a leader is assumed to be present initially. In the second protocol, the assumption of an initial leader is dropped. This leads to a symmetric protocol which uses an (abstract) timeout mechanism to detect the absence of a leader. Finally, in the last step of the design processes may crash without giving any notification of other processes. The worst case message complexity of all protocols is addressed. A formal approach to the specification and verification of the leader election protocols is adopted. The requirements are specified in a property-oriented way and the protocols are denoted by means of extended finite state machines. It is proven using linear-time temporal logic that the fault-tolerant protocol satisfies its requirements.