Stable Leader Election

We introduce the notion of stable leader election and derive several algorithms for this problem. Roughly speaking, a leader election algorithm is stable if it ensures that once a leader is elected, it remains the leader for as long as it does not crash and its links have been behaving well, irrespective of the behavior of other processes and links. In addition to being stable, our leader election algorithms have several desirable properties. In particular, they are all communication-efficient, i.e., they eventually use only n links to carry messages, and they are robust, i.e., they work in systems where only the links to/from some correct process are required to be eventually timely. Moreover, our best leader election algorithm tolerates message losses, and it ensures that a leader is elected in constant time when the system is stable. We conclude the paper by applying the above ideas to derive a robust and efficient algorithm for the eventually perfect failure detector ✸P .