A probabilistically correct election protocol in asynchronous distributed systems

Abstract

A Leader is a Coordinator that supports a set of processes to cooperate a given task. This concept is used in several domains such as distributed systems, parallelism and cooperative support for cooperative work. In completely asynchronous systems, there is no solution for the election problem satisfying both of safety and liveness properties in asynchronous distributed systems. Therefore, to solve the election problem in those systems, one property should be weaker than the other property. If an election algorithm strengthens the safety property in sacrifice of liveness property, it would never progress. But on the contrary, an election algorithm strengthening the liveness property in sacrifice of the safety property would have the high probability of violating the safety property. In this paper, we presents a safety strengthened Leader Election protocol with an unreliable failure detector and analyses it in terms of safety and liveness properties in asynchronous distributed systems. © Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg 2003.