Self-stabilization is an approach for fault tolerance in presence of transientfaults in distributed systems. Leader election in distributed systems is ofinterest because a leader is used for many key tasks like co-ordination,check-pointing, and acting as servers. In this paper, we consider the problemof electing a leader in networks of any topology in a self-stabilizing manner.We do not make any assumptions about the nature of transient faults, andeffectively deal with faults like corrupted messages, transmission errors, andfake ids. The robustness of our protocol is demonstrated by the fact that we donot make assumptions about knowledge of diameter of the network, or channelproperties. Our protocol also constructs a minimum depth spanning tree of thenetwork rooted at the leader. This is a desirable property in applicationswhere communication between a node and the leader takes place along the path inthe spanning tree.
By: Vinayaka Pandit, D.M. Dhamdhere
Published in: RI02009 in 2002
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