A new leader election implementation

Abstract

In this article we introduce a new implementation of a leader election algorithm used in the generic leader behavior known as gen_leader.erl. The first open source release of the generic leader [6] contains a few errors. The new implementation is based on a different algorithm, which has been adopted to fulfill the existing requirements. The testing techniques used to identify the errors in the first implementation have also been used to check the implementation we propose here. We even extended the amount of testing and used an additional new testing technique to increase our confidence in the implementation of this very tricky algorithm. The new implementation passed all tests successfully. In this paper we describe the algorithm and we discuss the testing techniques used during the implementation.