Election in the Qualitative World

Abstract

Abstract. In [3], Barrière et al. consider a qualitative model of distributed computing, where the labels of the entities are distinct but mutually incomparable. They study the leader election problem in a distributed mobile environment and they wonder whether there exists an algorithm such that for each distributed mobile environment, it either states that the problem cannot be solved in this environment, or it successfully elects a leader. In this paper, we give a positive answer to this question. We also give a characterization of the distributed mobile environments where the election problem can be solved.

Election and rendezvous with incomparable labels

“…Nevertheless, consider an algorithm designed to be executed by mobile agents over a network. If the agents have been implemented by different companies, and if the specifications of the algorithm do not specify how the integers must be represented, some agents can for instance store ⋆ A preliminary version of this paper has been published in [Cha06] numbers with most significant bit first whereas other agents store numbers with least significant bit first; in this case, the agents would not agree on the meaning of the sequence 01101. Moreover, it is always interesting to deal with algorithms that need less specifications, since they are generally more robust, and easier to implement in different models of distributed computing.…”