Multi-strategy-based leader election mechanism for the Raft algorithm

Abstract

Raft is a consensus algorithm that implements highly available replicas. As raft requires a leader to drive the protocol execution, it usually employs a round-robin leader election mechanism to select a random leader among all nodes. However, when the elected leader suffers from performance issues, the protocol will temporarily lose aliveness. To address this issue, we propose a multi-strategy leader election mechanism that allows nodes to proactively trigger a new round of election when they believe the leader suffers from performance issues, and replace this leader with a new one in a designated priority queue. The formal analysis and experimental results show that the mechanism can improve the system's throughput/latency without additional election time overhead.