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Self-stabilizing Leader Election in Networks of Finite-State Anonymous Agents

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Principles of Distributed Systems (OPODIS 2006)

Part of the book series: Lecture Notes in Computer Science ((LNTCS,volume 4305))

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Abstract

This paper considers the self-stabilizing leader-election problem in a model of interacting anonymous finite-state agents. Leader election is a fundamental problem in distributed systems; many distributed problems are easily solved with the help of a central coordinator. Self-stabilizing algorithms do not require initialization in order to operate correctly and can recover from transient faults that obliterate all state information in the system. Anonymous finite-state agents model systems of identical simple computational nodes such as sensor networks and biological computers. Self-stabilizing leader election is easily shown to be impossible in such systems without additional structure.

An eventual leader detector Ω? is an oracle that eventually detects the presence or absence of a leader. With the help of Ω?, uniform self-stabilizing leader election algorithms are presented for two natural classes of network graphs: complete graphs and rings. The first algorithm works under either a local or global fairness condition, whereas the second requires global fairness. With only local fairness, uniform self-stabilizing leader election in rings is impossible, even with the help of Ω?.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Computer Science, Yale University,  

    Michael Fischer & Hong Jiang

Authors
  1. Michael Fischer
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  2. Hong Jiang
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Editors and Affiliations

  1. Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory, MIT, USA

    Mariam Momenzadeh Alexander A. Shvartsman

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© 2006 Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg

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Fischer, M., Jiang, H. (2006). Self-stabilizing Leader Election in Networks of Finite-State Anonymous Agents. In: Shvartsman, M.M.A.A. (eds) Principles of Distributed Systems. OPODIS 2006. Lecture Notes in Computer Science, vol 4305. Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg. https://doi.org/10.1007/11945529_28

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/11945529_28

  • Publisher Name: Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg

  • Print ISBN: 978-3-540-49990-9

  • Online ISBN: 978-3-540-49991-6

  • eBook Packages: Computer ScienceComputer Science (R0)

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