Department of Computer Science & Engineering

Leader election is an important primitive in fault-tolerant distributed computing. In this paper, we propose a new specification for Leader Election motivated by the development of systems with the Primary-Backup approach to fault tolerance. We repeat a lower bound result on process replication that was previously shown, and then provide a new algorithm. There are three main contributions in the derivation of this algorithm. First, we show that a known lower bound is actually tight. Second, we design it using our model of dependent failures based on cores and survivor sets, thus enabling the use of such an algorithm in heterogeneous settings and illustrating the process of designing algorithms in this model. Finally, due to weaker requirements, this algorithm uses less replication than previous algorithms for leader election for receive-omission failures.

Pre-2018 CSE ID: CS2005-0812