Distributed Leader Election in P2P Systems for Dynamic Sets

The collection of and search for location information is a core component in many pervasive and mobile computing applications. In distributed collaboration scenarios this location data is collected by different entities, e.g., users with GPS enabled mobile phones. Instead of using a centralized service for managing this distributed dynamic location data, we use a peer-to-peer data structure, the so-called distributed space partitioning tree (DSPT). A DSPT is a general use peer-to-peer data structure, similar to distributed hash tables (DHTs), that allows publishing, updating of, and searching for dynamic sets. In this paper we present an efficient distributed leader election algorithm that can be used in DSPTs to eliminate redundant network traffic.