Led by nature: Distributed leader election in anonymous networks

Leader election in anonymous rings and complete networks is a very practical problem in distributed computing. Previous algorithms for his problem are generally designed for a classical message passing model where complex messages are exchanged. However, he need to send and receive complex messages makes such algorithms less practical for some real applications. Inspired by biological cell signalling, we present in his paper some simple approaches to distributed leader election in anonymous rings and complete networks. Our leader election algorithms all assume only one-bi messages are broadcast by nodes in he network and processors are only able o distinguish between silence and he arrival of one or more messages. Even with these harsh restrictions our algorithms are shown to achieve good time and message complexity both analytically and experimentally.