Fault-Tolerant Leader Election in Mobile Dynamic Distributed Systems

Abstract

This paper addresses the leader election problem in dynamic distributed systems with mobile processes. To do so, it is assumed that the system alternates periods of good and bad behavior, in the line of the timed asynchronous model of Cristian and Fetzer. We extend the eventual leadership properties recently proposed by Larrea et al. for non-mobile dynamic systems, defining two new properties that take into account graph joins/fragmentations due to process mobility. We also propose a new leader election algorithm in a weak mobile dynamic distributed system model. Using a categorization framework, we compare our system model with a number of models proposed in the literature, showing that our leader election algorithm works in a model which is weaker than the rest.