Specifying and implementing an eventual leader service for dynamic systems

Abstract

Abstract:The election of an eventual leader in an asynchronous system prone to process crashes is an important problem of faulttolerant distributed computing. This problem is known as the implementation of the failure detector Ω. Nearly all papers that propose algorithms implementing such an eventual leader service consider a static system. In contrast this paper considers a dynamic system, i.e., a system in which processes can enter and leave. The paper has three contributions. It first proposes a specification of Ω suited to dynamic systems. Then, it presents and proves correct an algorithm implementing this specification. Finally, the paper discusses the notion of an eventual leader suited to dynamic systems. It introduces an additional property related to system stability. The design of an algorithm satisfying this last property remains an open challenging problem.

Analyzing Eventual Leader Election Protocols for Dynamic Systems by Probabilistic Model Checking

“…In addition, Larrea et al [17] has pointed out the details and the keys to elect an eventual leader. In other words, to achieve the goal of electing an eventual leader, there are some significant conditions which must be satisfied, such as stability and synchrony condition-a leader should be elected under the circumstance of no more processes joining in or leaving out the system.…”

A Simple Broadcast Algorithm for Recurrent Dynamic Systems

“…These assumptions capture synchrony/stability requirements which are sufficient to solve non-trivial problems. Examples of problems and assumptions which allow these problems to be solved despite the uncertainty created by dynamicity are consensus (e.g., [8,11,16]), leader election (e.g., [17]), and mutual exclusion [21]). …”